✷
I cut open her stomach to find maggots
like milk bottles, the skeleton a crib
for rotting wishes. Seeing ten-year-old me
on a cold slab, the one who worried over
a pimple, a rosebud on the tip of her nose,
pain enters me, the width of a fat spindle.
✷
I sleep most days, each dream another
bloody animal hide leaving its scent on me.
Inside the hippocampus, we find our past selves
fossilized in dimpled rock, under the cactuses
of a canyon once submerged. We excavate
bony remains, catalogue the ribs and fingers
with a horror that clings when we wake,
cursed before we have tried to live again.
✷
Ten-year-old me was afraid of sharp thorns.
I am afraid of thoughts filed down to a blade
so fine it cuts apples like paper, words that make
specimens of ourselves and pin them to the wall.
Dissection is the second death, separating
the thick skin from the chipped shoulder
from the broken heart, each incision another
hard-earned lesson, the remaking of myself
into a whole.
✷──────────✷──────────✷
Devony Hof is a poet, actor and screenwriter from the Bay Area. Her poems have appeared in Right Hand Pointing, RockPaperPoem, The Fantastic Other and a previous issue of Moonday Mag, among others. She is currently working toward her MFA in screenwriting at University of Southern California. Check out her website, devonyhof.com, or follow her on instagram @devonyhof.
