Argonaut
To empty feels good, to purge interior of self, something warm gushing forth, a surge of possessiveness, of jealousy for what shapes my body could take, before my edges grew smudged. Any answer will erase us, I am not alone in this vanishing, how when I walk from the train to my college everyone’s eyes slide across me, I am a darkness, a gap between other things to look at.
With my cane, I am a vanishing act. With my fat body, I am strangely small; my queer haircut summons no mutters of dyke, of reckless or unforgivable. With my Southern throat,
they said that everything I make will be an analog of my self. Who knew
We are not made whole by pain, no matter what they say. We are broken by it, taught to peel back cushion between us and the world because we have no choice but to rebuild it, again, and, again,
BIO:Â Jesse Rice-Evans (she/her/hers) is a queer poet from North Carolina. Currently, she teaches queer lit at the City College of New York and paints her nails. Her first full-length poetry collection, The Uninhabitable, is forthcoming from Sibling Rivalry Press in 2019.
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