"Hooped" by Kristin Fouquet
2 Poems
Gravity, For a Brief Time, Does Not Touch Us
My lungs flood with overpass and the runoff
from a sea of human bodies
In the backseat we sing things like:
A thigh is a concrete bone and
Let’s cover the country in glitter
With tongue and teeth
I mimic a hum of wind
vibrating a window pane where
so many flecks of streetlight bounce
away from our faces before
we attach to them
We are a collection of cold
fingers in front of heating vents
Round hips shoveling into one another
Small eyes and mouths
swallowing everything
before it ceases to exist
The body becomes lighter
at the moment of death So,
go ahead, run
the hottest water
Only sometimes does the skin adjust
Something like a rabbit
Here is a clinking. An emptying. An undone coming. This energy of mine alone is a closed door.
Such smoothness, out of my body something breathes into unreliable space. The cold, it bites at
the stomach. I swallow the mess of me somehow. Sangrine-soaked and pulp. Two hands against
this door. Two hands carving into.
Marrow of bone break against me. It is something empty I have swallowed. I am coursing vein. I
am an avenue of flat breathing, glassed and shallow. This door is a tidal flat, neither terrestrial
nor aquatic. And what is the color of ice. Of smoke. I let blood. Fashion new constellations.
Make a feral dog from a modicum of luminous spheres. I feed it hard metal. I let the thing of me
continue to bite.
Danielle Susi is the author of the chapbook The Month in Which We Are Born (dancing girl press, 2015). Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Knee-Jerk Magazine, Hobart, and The Rumpus, among many other publications. She is a columnist for pioneertown and Entropy; a contributor to American Microreviews & Interviews, The Conversant, and The Angle; and the co-editor of HOUND. She received her MFA in writing from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Newcity has named her among the Top 5 Emerging Chicago Poets. Find her online at daniellesusi.com.
Kristin Fouquet photographs and writes from lovely New Orleans. Her photography has been widely published in both online journals and in print: magazines, chapbook and book covers, and CDs. Her preferences are fine art photography, street photography, and the occasional portrait. Visit her virtual abode at the web address http://kristin.fouquet.cc
