What we wanted was to be undone
to come unstuck unlocked
from our stupid dumb bodies mute dumb skin
Say a word long enough
and it turns entreaty turns hilarious turns real
What we wanted was to unbecome
fast sliding and undone
and for night to be the gun that shot us out
somewhere on the other side of ourselves
So many ways to quit the body to flood it up
and out to shuck the skin
in a rest stop bathroom
Even now I’m picking at it this life this skin
worrying the cuticles
In five decades all the arctic will be water
all my cells will be completely new
I’ll look out with my new cells new heart
water rising all around
me and me and not
Emily Geminder is the author of Dead Girls and Other Stories (October 2017), winner of the Dzanc Books Short Story Collection Prize. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in AGNI, American Short Fiction, Conjunctions, Kenyon Review, Mississippi Review, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. She is a PhD candidate in creative writing and literature at the University of Southern California.