"how changes your life" and "we all know I don't know how to let a thing, a body, go"

how changes your life

 

break out of the shadow
of the gate. it is not

 

there. find a word,
a way through, latent

 

developer of sentiment.
the chemical that courses

 

through divides also
the word, but—taste

 

the tea in your mouth.
the sediment. I can sense

 

a lie. dear one, I’ve thought
of all the primes in prisms.

 

still, they won’t show up
here. I miss you—then, turn

 

in turn. there’s nothing
but sky. 

 


 

we all know I don’t know how to let a thing, a body, go

 

I dream I am in a body that knows where other bodies
go when at rest. I find my inability to read this synapse
of text, your last words to me:
                                                            i think u were in 1 of my dreams

 

odd. uninhabitable, I dream you are living dead.
what is confused.

 

what I remember (most of you) lights a screen. the lie
of the undying:
                                    i can’t die

 

and my reply:
                          good.

 

each refractory position of this doom fractals.
when I speak to another you, I dream in another body.

 

suspended in the barely tapped vision of text, I discontinue
all that confused. my last words to you:
                                                                        kk

 

I can dream being into another body, yes, but not this
you. the screen light, once more, a fission of text.

 

a continuance. I mean to say something to you, as you are
not dead, and I am in a body that I know knows

 

something about bodies when they don’t live
with or without you.

 

 

Winner of the 2018 Iowa Review Award in poetry and the 2017 Vassar Miller Poetry Award, Shaina Monet is a New Orleans native. She also serves as a poetry editor at Bayou Magazine. Her work has appeared in Crazyhorse, Unlikely Stories, Sundog Lit, and Yemassee Journal. Currently, she has poems forthcoming in The Iowa Review. Find more about her work at: shainamonet.com

 

Edited for Unlikely by Jonathan Penton, Editor-in-Chief
Last revised on Tuesday, July 3, 2018 - 22:27