We subsist off
of the gradual ache
of our bodies, the heavy feeling,
the hot blood come loose, cascading.
This is how we know we are still
pertinent
or real.
We are being gored through,
or the feeling is the same,
fertility is like a sweet tomato
rotting inside of me.
Do you want it?
I would give it to you,
shed my duty to evolution,
come untethered from other people’s
marble eyes.
You could assume me,
my good teeth,
my peculiar curves and evasions
of the straight line.
Once you’re past forty and
have become a husk of yourself this is
what you would
kill for.
What is valuable:
the things inside me or
the ways of getting at them,
the significant ornaments of the flesh.
You can have my legs and
my crabapple breasts,
my talented mouth,
my good underwear.
I would give you also my
halves of children,
this arm, that eye.
I would give you my
delicate random genes
and room to incubate.
There are other ingredients
but I cannot supply them:
you have my
flesh and blood
to do with as you please,
which is not a bond or a promise
only a transaction.
You keep saying
they are a commodity but I have
no use for them,
they are treacherous at best:
I want some other skin made of sunlight,
I want weightlessness, I want purity,
I want love
without gradual decline.
Margaret Wack has had her work previously published in Eclectica, Liminality, and Strange Horizons, among others. More can be found at margaretwack.com
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