JESSE RICE-EVANS

Blood Powers

At 27, I am taking my meds appropriately for the first time ever.
I mean, I hoard my muscle relaxers for the inevitable day I
lose my insurance, my therapist, my half-
dozen specialists.

(Down my throat is a field
full of stones, a poppy,
a fern. Peel me and find something growing,
a long thread of green, spiralling.

You were not the first to let me loose,
but you did lose the key that kept me up at night,
the soft down of your thigh a chapter, introductory.)

Fingers knead along spine, hulk into knotted mass, mysteriously dense like planetary rock;
feel that she says, knots are just a locus of
instability, they hum under her hands,
denser than steel, soft as down, a firm and unforgiving
I;

take the long way home.

I am small victories and mostly
grief, because my existence can't
continue without these smallnesses, the way I rinse
anger, flush fear. I bottle kindnesses and collect them into
my backpack, ringing with small chorus of
medicines, the kind I can pocket
or swallow whole

Specimen: Men

Daughter-drenched, daughter-
cocked, daughtered

I am triggered by white men, how they are coded but still hunt: wolves loosed from the edges I neglect to trim, how I magma over the couch, around the corners like stark under but also through: knowing and mooding frivolous, allowing a jealousy to snake through the hunk of scar tissue clumped together at

Feed me something false; I don't
care about favors, or what I owe you:
your disgrace your cruelty a lightbox easy
qualities to mock or miss

Get closer; come closer;
handle me like a trinket
waiting beyond a shelf or
tucked away somewhere

Wound me: cut scrum back like a shrub,
crack me caustic and ghastly, the things I boil
inside an echo, spinal fluid a wet apology

Insufferable vain woman after
woman carving their names into
the mirror, the shock of recognizing
a voice and running

I remember the voices I've
purged: a sense for sound
I am unraveling

I can never be scrubbed clean of my past,
my sympathies; after a Percocet, I am looser,
abundant and generous, shedding desperation
to feel useful, to become more than a gracious
host, a spiny intellect

Still I mourn the apologia of my
condition: unable to stand in the
ways I used to stand: you know,
on my legs, brutal anger, you after
bottle of pinot Grigio, an excess

My mother needs my plans in advance

Call me specimen

Call me home

Call me backpack full of pain pills, heating patches, wax earplugs, hem unburdened;

Everything is a restriction, so I unbutton
my jeans, peel them like a skin and recline
beside window upon heating pad with la
croix with tequila with an idleness I find frightful

[ Interlude with Affirmations ]

I am whole the way I am: blissfully unattached to the pieces of my body that carry my grief

I make medicine out of stuff I buy at the herb shop: vials of oil and vodka that I secrete behind my teeth anyway

I am a cult of my own person: the chubby adorned pliable but brittle inside

My desperation: first of many. Hollow, or hollowed, depending on where you stand; how I ask for opening as treasure panel, hidden limb.

I hang my coat by the fire and slip into my nightskin, my mourningown. Doing my best means letting best become endless. Standing inside an awning is the best place to meet an old friend.

Intubate me baby. you know where to look for acid reflux. I'm not demented; I'm just old. I'm not worried.

Specimen: Become a Bright Wind

after Sarah Jean Grimm

I want my body to be boring! Not even a Sontagian metaphor, literally a shell that goes through the rote easily and welcome.

Love is not a body; love is not a body; aliveness is abdication usually a kind of surrender it seems to me the best way to live is ironically, but not self-aware. All girls know how to make this live: inhabit the body, just barely, your self a dim echo at the end of a hallway of your favorite building, something millennial pink and dripping with Easter lily, golden pothos, stuff that lives indoors

I can't tell you anything: I sold you out and never apologized, but I didn't mean anything by it.

Is anyone else coming?

Is anyone else after you?

She's making noises again, even as I closed the door against her furred body, the paths I took to take her easy, the sedative wearing off means welcome—do you know anyone who can handle me? If not I am alone for a long run, an endless abyss

Call me specimen

Call me home

Call me longing, longing;

Jesse Rice-Evans (she/her/hers) is a white neuroqueer femme and Southern poet based in NYC (unceded Lenape territory). Read her work in Hematopoiesis, Peach Mag, glittermob, and Nat. Brut, among others, and in her debut collection The Uninhabitable (2019) from Sibling Rivalry Press.