Buried There:
A bee mutating the lime green front porch’s safe space
The bee is “liminality”
The bee is gilded clit, a pun on snatch/snitch,
Free from the constraints of animal and/or woman
It is easy to name yourself, hard to tell others
Let my name be this sting cleaving red, puckered fat
Or name be the loose black hairs I gag from my shoulders w/ tweezers
Tell my name I want to be totally plastic, flat like boy or bitmap,
Real name a sinewave coiled like an ingrown hair beneath my fake name
Name boring geology of the latex bodysuit I groped with surprise
At the sex shop in LA where I basically died
Though all the tour guides were right: palms & pussy-smell & dying
There’s dying everywhere, what did I expect?
World take this labial deadname, this Motorola buzz in the grave
Or chime abscessing the flat plane, a hole for C sharp and the boy me
Buried there so no one can smell him
**
Prove It:
I keep my muse slender
Excuse me
There she is now
Spelunking an Oreo
For white is a damning color
The color of fat
For if I had a vacuum hot enough
For if I had a third hand
There are so many things I am afraid to touch
Distressed “woman”
Garish calorie
The world balking at the edge of it
You darn your pointe shoes alone
The other girls buzz together
As one as many
Miss Jenny comes to teach you
How to do it the right way
With her hair and obese body
Though when you say you are sick
She will not believe you
Prove it
**
“O Interior, my wounds are your wounds” – Nathan Hoks
I who want to be 14 years old and small
I who am water freezing & melting endlessly
Me with my aura: thyroid w/ a hint of mimosa
I with my fat-stuffed dovecote
Which hides everything living
Though I have faith in the pastoral
Though I have faith in gender entirely
The phist a fruit bruised with logic
Which like light touches everything
Except Ben who is either
A seam or an epigraph
Before the list of nutrition facts
On a bottle of Muscle Milk left curdling
In the sun for days like a billboard
Or someone else’s old Myspace page
Which could be yours or couldn’t
**
REBA FAY is a poet-composer from Washington D.C. A graduate of the University of Virginia, she is an MFA student in Sound at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago who performs music and text under the moniker Swan Meat. Recent full-length publications include Welcome (Gauss PDF, 2016).