Lorelei Bacht
cw: aging, postpartum bodies, lifelong illness, periods, hormone impact on health
Deficient
The delicate, teleological machinery
of hormones: one long column addition –
forget one count or counterpoint,
the chemical construction falls
apart. Why are you always sick?
They ask in disbelief - their compassion
failing to expand to the full length
of my perpetual cold. I am the weak
link, the coal-miner's canary detecting
plagues long before they begin
to torment my brothers, and still
battling long after they are healed.
I am advised to cook up chicken soup,
vitamins, a medieval cornucopia of herbs,
unicorn hoof powder. The cause is lost.
Host of the minutes, my body works not
for me, but for the motes - a breeding ground,
a factory, my lymphocytes perpetually
perplexed before the commonest
of common colds.
*****
Crimson in metric
Inner landscape
of spongious regularity
oozing its crimson in metric
a long, long middle age -
flesh upon flush
of pig iron and fern.
I have already made
more of myself, lessened
the breast, given,
given, yet continue
monthly to devour
whatever left of our
caterpillars on pin
cushions, our wings not blue
but red - the beating fabric
of my kind.
*****
A Body Lost, A Body Found
A body of rainbows,
unseparated from its source -
a universe in a small container.
A body ripe and accustomed
to all seasons: the rich, the poor,
the narrow and the large.
A body fit for one, for two, for others
yet to come, miraculously making more
from half-remembered dreams.
A body of glass beads, of knotted
molasses, of intentions and edibles
laid out on the table.
A body of work acquired through trial
and errors - these errors aged,
now translucent and beautiful.
A body of music, a body muscular,
rebuilt, willing itself to meet
a brand new world in the morning.
A body manifold: folds and
creases, a space to hide jewels
and happen more than once.
A body like a sparkling fish,
the glimmer of the river all around -
a body lost, a body found.
*****
Lorelei Bacht (she/they) is currently running out of ways to define herself, and would like to reside in a tranquil, quiet form of uncertainty for a while. Her recent work has appeared and/or are forthcoming in Anti-Heroin Chic, Visitant, The Wondrous Real, Abridged, Odd Magazine, Postscript, PROEM, SWWIM, Strukturriss, The Inflectionist Review, Hecate, and others. She is also on Instagram: @lorelei.bacht.writer and on Twitter: @bachtlorelei