This Is An Example Of My Functionality
My blood flows from heart to legs to toes back to heart.
My foreshortening is fucked.
Always too soon.
I’m in the shadow… I mean I’m in the shower.
When my neck has been washed, I wash my shoulders.
Oh my god I’m so alone.
I will never find a way to tell you how pale I am.
I am too pale.
Rubbing my arm, rubbing my arm.
Other body parts.
When I close my eyes, I see my blood inside my eyelids
and the air and the room.
This feels semi-public.
Blood
and the legend of the whale—
and its three hundred epigraphs.
Four thousand epigraphs.
Five thousand epigraphs.
I am in a tank.
The tank is five foot ten
It covers me like a glove, a glove with a large butt.
Shut the fuck up with your purple eye shadow.
A glove with a large butt.
When the sun sets, we will shower again.
I don’t know what I would do without this pool of grain surrounding me.
A beach, the Australian crawl,
figuring out the math for piss in chlorine
and still being clean.
When I was toddler my sister Molly and I took a bath together.
We splashed.
I pooped. She was alarmed in a way I did not recognize
from the times I had peed in the tub. I mean—

It was just me.

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Amy Lawless is originally from Boston and lives in Brooklyn. Black Maze Books published her first book, Noctis Licentia, last year. For more information on Amy, please see her blog.