Unmade
I am a palimpsest: leather
-bound body with its edits
& erasures visible;
marginalia, withered words
seen & unseen; failure scars
my fortune, blossom
of mauve stretchmarks, hips
no children will widen; god,
even my bones ache
to be—to be—to be; altered
beasts of becoming, banned
shapes; sex changes
a person, the first questions
we ask ourselves—glances
between our legs &
cupping our chests in search
of Adam, a knife in the torso
to extract Eve within
us; I am not saying god made
a mistake I am only saying he
made my body a fault
line when I was a cell dividing
myself in half—when I was a
gamete/soldier/asylee/
engine/abomination/girl/boy/
twinkle-in-my-father’s-eye—
when I was nothing,
I was perfect, two small hands
clasped in prayer, just waiting
to become unmade—
Floodtown
The collective heart is buried
in unsown fields: trampled on
& tilled with shit, sludge of night
soil mixed with futile earth.
Beyond the empty fields is a river.
Stillborn river, its banks overgrown
with blue & violet phlox, changes
everything around it. It rushes
ahead of itself around bends, carves
meaning into the land, gives itself away
to the laboring doe as she lies down
to set free twin fawns. But the river
is a gentle tyrant. Torrents spilling over
its borders in the storms of late spring,
it surges and saturates the barren ground.
The fields turn septic, our dreams encased
in filth. Our waiting makes us bitter,
dark. We ache to burst through, a single
seed. The river was our first love, but
now we are at the mercy of the rain.
Lane Fields is a queer, trans poet living in Boston and a student of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Lane’s poetry has appeared in places such as Hobart, Yemassee, Interim, and Tupelo Press’s 30/30 Project. You can follow Lane on Instagram at @lane.fields or Twitter at @ohwowitslane.