Art Ticker

Fiona Chamness

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.




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