Selkie
The men who love my body
have delighted in the clothes peeled
off and vanished into heaps
against dark rooms, the dim ripple
of what light remains patterning
my fish-pale belly, my breasts
like silver ghosts. It is as though
they believed we were cutting through
to the truth of my nakedness together. Later,
as they slept, I have trawled
quiet hands through the sheets in search
of discarded textures, and in searching
seeped back to myself from the coiled cloister
of the brain. In these layers
I slip through the world,
tender my soft enigma against its wishes.
The men put their ears to me
and mistake the echo of their own blood
for an ocean. I am not
here. I must remember to be here. I bind
myself to life by force of loneliness.
Let me tell another way
I was once loved. The depression
was a night sea with no boat.
He led me to his bedroom. It was
not lovemaking. I pulled off my dress
but beneath it was another dress. I asked
not to be let go and was not
let go. All he wanted was to keep me
in the world, so he made a space shaped
like what I was. I am a like
a human being. My body tries to stay.
But do not think if you want the truth
that you are looking at the outside
of a woman. No. I am the inside
of an animal. If I am
to be loved, it must be as this creature
of half-presence, this formless spill
of feeling. You must know it is the mind
that is for me the most naked; every day
I wake up into it and go out
to find my skin.
Fiona Chamness is a poet, essayist, fiction writer, and musician based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Her published work can be found in PANK, Blood Lotus Journal, Radius Lit, Muzzle Magazine, and the Beloit Poetry Journal as well as in several anthologies and in the full length-poetry collection Feral Citizens co-authored with Aimée Lê. She was the recipient of the Beloit Poetry Journal’s Chad Walsh Prize in 2014. As a musician, she released a solo album Dispatches from the Well on Insister Records in 2012. She is also guitarist, co-vocalist and co-songwriter for the queer feminist punk band Cutting Room Floor, whose debut album You Shouldn’t Be Here was released in 2013. Her published work can be accessed at www.fionachamness.com.