Arctic

Emily Geminder

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.