After the Nagakin Capsule Tower
1. If I want to be a seashell.
Metabolize me! Trivial hunger makes it go down easy, the body, designed through concrete & nebulae, every bit replaceable but still unreplaced because organic is better in theory. Still I cry: easy folding, easy going, like love jitters or nationalist fervor, like ragdoll dummies in ragdoll waltz—my limbs heavy with female bloat. How else do you explain completion in a single moon cycle?
2. If I want to be a mold.
Aging is a blessing until it's not. See, pulse, pulse: your greatest post-war project is up for sale at a metaverse auction where every ugly idea is written through object-orientation. See, pulse, pulse: I want so deeply to fit you in my pocket my fingers flinch their frenetic verse. I shake with the earth’s laughter.
3. If I want to be a spirit.
A woman’s work is always. A women’s work is always insect-scale: tiny, infinite; you kill one and there’s always another. The copper embroidery of my 8-bit heart is information science with silent e.
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Rachel Stempel is a queer Ukrainian-Jewish poet and PhD student at SUNY-Binghamton. She is the author of the chapbooks Interiors, winner of the 2021 Wallace Award from Foundlings Press, BEFORE THE DESIRE TO EAT (Finishing Line Press), and Dear Abbey (Bottlecap Press). She is represented by Danielle Burby at Mad Woman Literary.