Disembodiment

By Annelie Hyatt

I touch the wrinkles on your hand. I touch body & blister on your knees.

This rumination, this elegy, is a wildflower drowned too heavily in water or not meant to be tamed at all.

I touch the slothful petal, I touch stem like soliloquy. You suspend yourself like a melody, you become the melody & tease me from a crevice in the trees.

You exist but do not recognize your existence every avenue, I look for you.

This divinity, this nausea, this consciousness,

distinguishing body from stone perpetuates & presses

down on my forehead as if to say: existence was a box with unfathomable edges.

I touch my face, glittering with tears and darkness and rust

exhaust the consciousness, the thought of me discovering you in some obscure city

this palace of tears this anxiety

this face I do not recognize

it all comes back to me begins again, rewrites itself. I touch whatever object i can find

how shallow was the air that I breathed — and to convince myself,

that it is possible to live off words and bones.

To touch you as if you were the consciousness I felt into existence —

but you disappear, and I disarm, unravel, melt into this cruel-minded grass.

#December2020