Three poems by Katherine Gwynn
Where the Marrow Lies
You feel both so new and bone-deep,
to me.
you’re right there, when I crack my femur--
just there, where the marrow lies,
floating, flotsam light, on your back.
I thought marrow was soft, yellow-white,
like bacon grease,
fat easily slicked and scooped out
with my fingertips
but it’s firmer than that.
A food blog I found when googling
“do bone marrow and love have the same texture?”
tells me animal marrow is a delicacy and that it is
unctuous
and I repeat this word as a question each night
to my splintered femur,
to you,
as I wait for you to sift yourself out of
my platelets, and red blood cells, and white blood cells
(you sway your hands among them and
marrow does not have as much give to it
as I thought but
they all ripple out from you regardless,
quivering,
like waterlilies in a pond).
And after I’ve waited, and the waterlilies are still,
and you’ve risen from my bones
Each night, you touch my cheek
With the pads of two fingers--
a yellow-white mark left behind, clinging, like a petal--
Just before you press them to
the open gasp of my mouth
and I lick them clean.
Chimera
It’s like I’m an
animal
But more than an
animal, I’m a
corpse of
crows or
A herding of
buffalo,
Running across the firebrush of burned plains to make way for
New growth
My hooves or my wings--
I forget which I am,
What limbs have been ordained for me--
My
hooves or my
wings
pressing charred bone deeper into the dirt
5 eyes,
and 10 ears,
and 23 bellies,
and 46 legs
and 77 arms,
I have too much and too little to make sense of
I churn and I echo and I grasp for
something 3 dimensional,
that takes up Space
in the way one is supposed to take up space
I cram
between the gaps of every
atom
I can grip
between my teeth,
But they always split into
quarks,
into
smaller
pieces
I can no longer see
With all my naked eyes
they stare back at all my naked eyes and my too much body across the dinner table
And every flap of my skin
triggers a flinch from them,
And every quiver of breath in my throat
shuffles their shoulders
they possess so much less bone and sinew than I do
but somehow
they
loom
taller
than I can ever manage to straighten my spine
to
reach
my tongue hanging thick down onto the ground
onto the floor, my body
one constant stutter
made up of
bastardized typeface
a language they can’t wrap their hands around
I’m packs of flesh and fur and feather stretched
Wing to wing
Hoof to hoof
Tongue to tongue
to
Move in synchrony to
Move as
one,
I’m a
Pack, a
Herd,
A corpse
Snouts arched in the air,
Beaks snapping at the clouds
scent of blood in the sky—
Striving for something
Else
Some other kind of
animal
to lay within my
body.
Host
I think all women smell of you
which is to say the way I think you smell is the memory of the way you
dragged yourself across my thigh,
the knots your hair tangled into my mouth,
the shake of your vocal chords against my teeth,
a hum for grief that hadn’t surfaced yet.
They,
which is to say the women,
all women,
move past me in shapes I don’t recognize,
or have never seen.
Just been told about,
around campfires, from old men with chewing tobacco
staining their teeth black,
the flames keeping us a safe distance apart
But I still try to move just behind them,
these women
Hide myself within the shadows they cast across the dry earth,
the cracked cement,
Imagine they are more than shadow,
hoping an imprint can nourish and fill the gaps,
catch the scent their hair leaves behind if they have hair
And if they don’t,
then take a torch and lift it up to their faces,
the heat burning the hairs inside my nose, just to see if it is you in another form,
another body taken over
Which is to say I would weep,
heaving my body under water, under the earth, under the smell I’ve told myself is yours, is you
Because I wanted to be the only body you ever left behind
Stepped out of like the husk of some creature
lucky enough to leave their skin among the dirt
Katherine Gwynn is a playwright and poet. Gwynn's plays have been recognized by the Eugene O'Neill National Playwrights Conference (Currently 2020 Semi-Finalist), the Princess Grace Playwriting Fellowship (2019 Semi-Finalist), Ashland Play Festival (2019 Semi-Finalist), LezPlay (2019 Finalist) The Great Plains Theatre Conference (May 2018), the Bay Area Playwrights Festival (2019 Semi-Finalist, 2018 Finalist, 2017 Semi-Finalist) and the Women in Theatre Program, where Merely Players won the Jane Chambers Student Playwriting Award in 2015. They also were awarded 1st place in the William H. Carruth Memorial Poetry Contest and 2nd place in the Edgar Wolfe Award in Fiction (KU, 2015).