I live in a body whose name I never learned, spoken to me in a strange tongue, its alphabet
of hollow vowels & vaulted roofs of mouths all echoing as static. This body is dangerous. That is
to say, it is dangerous to inhabit this body. To maneuver your way through this body is to be a specter
in your own house, to sleep in the grain of its floorboards. I am a haunting in the shape of a person. How I ache.
I long for a body whose name I know but cannot say. I hunger for faint lines of collagen, healed-over gifts of wounds
on my chest, so that I may be both seen & unseen. O pulse, o vessel, o braided sinew—be holy. Be true. Be a home.
Lane Fields is a queer, trans poet living in Boston and a student of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Lane’s poetry is forthcoming or has appeared in places such as Hobart, Yemassee, Rust & Moth, and Tupelo Press’s 30/30 Project.