rachel lockwood
3am awakening
Dream of Hitchcock birds
gory and oil-slick,
the mineral sharpness of their beaks.
The mind hunkers down, on the hind limb,
full of vestigial organs, the fins
from when we swam to live.
The mind is watery, the birds
turn sour, falcon their way out.
In a bedroom the mind wakes sweaty.
We grip rivers in our hands,
never turn our backs on the ocean,
nest down, we take names,
cavort around clutching
massive cardboard ‘E’s to our chests.
We could imagine a new language
full of eels and sheep,
full of little mice and
native rodents, little things
that burrow.
eyes bigger than my stomach
Sometimes you have to sit with your naked body until you feel a kinship with it.
Sometimes you have to pull up your shirt and check for cancer.
Sometimes you must look in the mirror and inhabit your body
like a planet you call home.
Sometimes you must acknowledge your flat feet
and shaky breath as sub-optimal. The way the neck goes into the shoulders.
The collar bone, the rotator cuff, the rotator cuff flails and swells,
and everything purple and tight.
Sometimes you have to sit with your body, and recall every romantic story with a fat girl in it.
Sometimes you have to talk to your body like it’s a puppy
you brought home from the shelter, with crazed eyes.
Sometimes you are the only one figuring out that your mind
is just as much in your blood, in your flesh, as it is in your mind,
not some silver light
that shines from the top of your head.
Sometimes you have to sit with your body like an old war horse.
Sometimes you have to sit with your body like it could be a movie star and say it and say it and say it and say it.
Sometimes you have to sit with your body
until it’s summer and you can be more cruel.
Sometimes you have to sit with your body like
the way your limbs are attached matters less.
Sometimes you have to sit with your body
like it could be something other than itself. Your body,
like it could be different and far away.
Rachel Lockwood is from Hawkes Bay, and is now living and studying in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. She has been published in Starling, Salient, NZ Poetry Shelf, Milly Magazine and Stasis.