Pink Moon
Jesse Rice-Evans
Youth is a thing crammed between other things. I think I am towards the end of it.
Researchers are looking into feelings. They can have mine, the sharp and stony, creamy centers scalloped with blade.
If beauty is a wound, I was born scarred over, pink and hungry, trickling pale under your fingers.
I go in pink, come out blistered. You are a fire no one can stop, inflammable, I admit it, some days I am all burned out.
If I burned like I once burned, I would leave you smoldering. Instead I clutch heat like a gem, fill coat pockets with crystals holding heat, rose quartz and tourmaline, alien.
In linen, you are floral, lush palm in streak of desert, welcoming my pocked face to rest, a clean flat sunlit, not enough coffee in the house, letting me sleep anyway.
In the beginning, I was inconsolable, convinced of inevitable grief, moonset too early, knowing those jeans won’ t fit anymore.
Not good at being decorative, I am resigned to subjecthood. Sometimes I just want to be used, without agency, a thing. What kind of feminist does that make me?
Use me.
In the future, bodies will be things we try on like shoes, consciousnesses scurrying among blood and skin. My future-body is never hungry except for the specific hunger for work and late nights in your bed, finally big enough for me.
I remember the day I felt woman( belted wool coat, air bright with altitude).
50 Cauldron Anthology