Investigations in dis/embodiment by Michelle Arnett
Moments after waking, attention feigns raw
as I watch the edges of you expand and withdraw—
tracing the spotlight of morning sunbeam
cast on the vulnerable canopy of your ribcage.
All I have to do is reach my hand out
to encounter the living, breathing
phenomenon of your skin—
I let my finger tips sink gently before extending,
and imagine an ensuing tidal wave
of blood rushing through your veins.
You’re somewhere deep down in it,
so I stifle the desire to dig further,
(as if your body were just clay
and my fingers fit to excavate to your core;
equal parts delicate and omniscient—
the constitution of all things made dumb
in the palm of one’s hand).
As you make the journey back from sleep,
you animate in alien movements.
When your eyelids finally open, I watch
a discarnate truth of you propel back
inside of your unconscious,
so once again the limits of waking life,
the secrets comprising love and lust,
remain out of reach—can be negotiated.
As you rise and move topless, towards the kitchen,
the tiny muscles of your back begin to activate
with ephemeral frequency, transmitting
messages like morse code underneath the skin;
When you reach for a cup,
remember when
float your hand to the faucet,
our bodies were strange
pull up to release water,
familiar only by degrees of separation
Lips parting,
presented as sterile tissue
the soft pinkness of you emerging,
without intelligence
pressed behind glass,
before we knew of electrical currents
but then teeth like pearls exposed,
exchanged sub rosa
your jagged edges burnished
a tacit knowledge
an illusion of weathering
an invisible force
in the glow of the crescent moon
felt when your pulse encounters mine
rising from the corner of your mouth.
Just past your head there’s the kitchen window
and that tiny red speck that won’t wash off
from last Spring, when a bird thrashed
against the glass, over and over again
“it thinks it’s the sky,” you said
“it’s after its own reflection,” I responded
before it collapsed into the hedges.
I punched holes into a paper bag,
the mortified look on your face,
put the bird inside, and only a day later
as I told you it was “normal,”
he was back in the tree, unashamed
it happens all the time
on the branch, fucking and chirping
you said it’s a bit disturbing;
and then the speckled blue eggs appeared,
before a nest of celestial babes, with their fixed
version of fragility obvious, embodied
how I seem to welcome morbidity into my life
And outside the cardinals chirp, privy
to the composition of beginnings and endings.
Michelle Arnett is an emerging writer of poetry, and co-founder of Rose Garden Press, through which she self-published a collection of poetry, the bird bath poems (2020). She recently completed her Master's of Library and Information Science at Western University.