A. Rene

A. Rene is a poet and archivist based in Washington, D.C. She is the co-runner of Creatives Club DC's Poetry Workshop and the 2018 recipient of the Andrea Klein Willison Prize for Poetry. She can be found @arene.poetry on Instagram for poetry updates and pictures of things she finds on sidewalks.

Easy read of the poems in the images above:

Sidestroke

CW: birth, pregnancy termination, blood

In this wayward version of my childhood room—

the wallpaper peeling in the corner,

that red carpet, long gone, returned and disintegrating

—I hack at the fleshen noose fallen between my legs

with sewing shears from the oak desk.

The yearbooks haven’t been thrown out yet.

I press a peach fuzz head into my chest, feel a small foot kick.

The child symbol is removed from the body symbol.

I pop a pimple and dream of hiking up a plateau

to dig a grave, palms streaked red

When I’m done, I see I’m not the first one

here, who’s punctured a small cavity into the earth

as a pitted farewell.

Might I write a short ode to their fingernails,

to their silence, unwantedness,

to myself for never having even thought them?

In my calendar app I mark a blue dot for a new nuvaring

settled against my cervix. Another dot

for the discharge that grips to it when it’s removed.

What makes this blood different

from the blood resting beneath my cheeks,

the blood seeping out where a fingernail dug,

the blood communing in a hospital storeroom, that holy syrup.

I remember how the smell of chlorine sterilized

the red in my bathing suit at the YMCA

behind a flimsy stall door, the lock removed,

a perfectly circular gash in the metal.

I threw the red away and no one ever knew.

Here again, the shrieks of swim class

splinter against the tile,

I let my cheek rest against the water’s surface

and create no ripples.

December

Shadows graze

the floorboard grooves

and in the crescent of your body,

my paper limbs fold against my chest.

This morning stretching

like a yellow measuring tape along my waist

and the sound of hair

as it is weeded

and pulled in fistfuls.

There is a small dream,

too sweet to ever touch,

and dust that settles like weights upon your back.

There is the comforter

burnishing our skin

and light struggling

against the blinds.

There are teeth dressed as daggers

as they whisper good morning 

against the soft underbelly of my arm

and the tile’s pith molding

on the shower walls,

your gentle hand acting as the drain.

I step from the water, stare

at the thin skin of the mirror,

sever the joints I remade with my tongue.

They never warned me—

of the wherewithal of breath, the smear

of petroleum against our lips,

a sled of sweat speeding down my arm from its humid

pit, cool air bejeweling the path—

I pull a leg through stiff denim.