Inventory
• my hand is no longer blue
• I have never counted all my teeth
• there is a mouse in my hair and my fingers stroke her tail until they cramp
• i would like to take a cheese grater to my thighs
• just for the feeling
• ashes make my eyelashes fuzzy and sometimes they slip over my corneas like fog
• blinking them out has gotten stickier
• each of my limbs are made of twitches
• including my tongue
• my tongue is a limb
• and so are each of my fingers
• there’s blood behind my cheek
• old blood
• I swallow it
• pretend it wasn’t there
• still taste it
• my guts panic and climb my ribs like a ladder so i count both
• the guts and the ribs
• there is too much mess and not enough bone to hold it up (someone should put in an order)
• i pull back my fingernails
• gotta keep what speaks raw
• my lungs tense when snow falls off the roof
• i haven’t taken my asthma medication in five years
• my mouth was the first part of myself i found beautiful
• but only when closed
• felt pretty all last week
• there is rust in my throat
• it tastes like swamp and cicada exoskeleton
• i have an exoskeleton
• i wear it like safety
• and more often than not
• when i do it echoes if you touch it
• i think the heat inside it rots the rest of me
Thea Rowe is a developing writer and poet from Michigan. She has been involved with the literary arts community in Ann Arbor, Michigan since 2016. She participated in the Brave New Voices international poetry slam in 2017 with the Ann Arbor poetry slam team. Her work is to explore honestly: the self and womanhood in the twenty-first century.
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