magnificent,
the way one year folds into another the way skin stretches into infinity the way a few bones and some breath fill up this space inside
follicles are follies sprouting trees and your breath is a gale
oh laughter
i haven’t seen my thighs in over a week just because i haven’t looked doesn’t mean they aren’t there and what exactly is a “thigh” a sigh with a lisp
sometimes there is no inside
on my birthday i have many teeth see many teeth dream of gleaming incisors at rest
welcome, please come in. welcome, please come in. welcome, please come in. welcome, please come in. welcome, please come in. welcome, please come in.
no one is home, come back later.
ropes of intestines are a drawbridge between ingestion and internal combustion. so many ropes, ropey ropes, a mess of ropes making a mess a gorgeous thick mass of messy ropes.
i have been evicted oh my
, fortress
aren’t we all shapeshifters
aren’t we all babies throwing snowballs and wearing aprons? aren’t we all shapeshifters?
aren’t we all moving between planes, losing our baggage and reclaiming it at the next destination? aren’t we all
lost? aren’t we all sifting through realities
aren’t we all shapeshifters
morphing with perceived conditions, diagnosed, repurposed, reconditioned fractals
aren’t we all melting
aren’t we all full of anxiety
aren’t the birds dropping seeds into the open sockets
aren’t we all shapeshifters
shifting gears, realities, tectonic plates
shifting one seat down
shifting your weight from side to side
shifting in and out of consciousness
shifting stacks, shifting focus
aren’t we all shapeshifters
aren’t we all sorry for the inconvenience
aren’t we all sons of bitches
aren’t we all shapeshifting deck hands
aren’t we all shapeshifting amoebas
aren’t we all more careful than that, aren’t we sure of our place
aren’t we more beautiful after
sundown, aren’t we cheeky
aren’t we sick to our stomachs
aren’t we shitting bricks
aren’t we all the spoils
delivered to the victor
aren’t we all a bit shaky at first
untitled
you thought you’d
let a little air in
to let the evil out–
make a hundred tiny mouths,
like red, red ribbons
streaming out.
you thought you’d
let us
figure it out,
how the little howling mouths
learned to shout.
Gr Keer is a poet and librarian living in Oakland. They prefer long walks on foggy beaches, complicated personalities, awkward silences, and the pronoun “they.” Their work has appeared in THEM: a trans lit journal, Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics, and a chapbook called heterotextual.
