“Someday You Will Be Worn Again,” “Metamorphoses (Uh-oh, Stinky)” & “Insulation” by Ria Mai Geguera

Someday You Will Be Worn Again

tomorrow my brother starts his first (paying) job this year
my grandma texted my grandma in all caps 
THANK GOD and omitted any comments 
about his activist hair and atrophied clothing. 
the air is different with birds 
if they were crickets it’d be hedging, their long doubtful whines
in the echoed sunlight, what colors are we changing? even the
blankets feel deeper, 
even my roommate’s high school bestie on her eleventh whippit.
my teeth hurt. i’m doing laundry 
there’s nothing i want to cut out with sound 
my voice just hasn’t been around, much 
too cold, too much effort to shake on purpose 
come to living room temperature. 
someday it will be warm again, 
and i’ll be too brown for blushes but flush with the sun. i’ll
put away the wrong coats and leave the window open more.
the candle smoke will keep on rising — 
in time i’ll stop picking at my fingers, 
i’ll fix my old gloves. 
my hands will put on a show with new sheets and old jackets,
and my lungs won’t freeze on air that feels like something else
glittering with infinite spring. 
on my scarves will settle the dust of forever juggling.
i’ll wake up with my stuff already laid out.

Metamorphoses (Uh-oh, Stinky)

I think maybe you’d feel better if you stunk less. 
Whatever rises into the air is not only erosion 
but seepage, byproduct, chemical fumes, musky salt.
Some transformations are gross even when they are good. 

And as for the well-used air whistling out my nose —
It’s its own industrial rhythm. 
My sweat, my skin, my shit, my spit 
swirls dreamily on unseen winds, alights or accumulates on
a thousand million billion different microscopic textures. 

Lying down it’s like my heartbeat shakes the world.
You see, my choices are minute yet seismic, 
minute by minute. 
What I leave behind when I scrub and scour is the cost of exertion;
What I am achieving is a succession of more aesthetic cocoons.

Insulation

Do you ever think, 
my body doesn’t deserve this?
What creature are you raising?
Despite all the preoccupations
of a billion fingers and thumbs 
it’s the same trillion microbes
that make your frame a home.
Do you think you can store life
in the bags under your eyes?
Seal the drafts with blue light,
some kind of pure humanity?

Tags: chapbook finalist, felicia douglass, ria mai geguera