TOOTHED
(With a phrase from CAConrad)
I’ve hit the edge of my aging
to find it lined with
psychic barbed wire.
Ten years later, and here I am
thinking the difference
between artifact and architecture
is one seen through a pinhole.
I’ve walked furniture laps
around my apartment,
strangering my own artifacts,
thinking repetition will
skeleton the poems
and fill the body’s pockets.
I’ve picked up my new strangers
and thought godless, swamp thing
and thought cue the song
already coming up
through the floorboards
and thought
strangers are proof
the world goes on without us
NIGHT IS AS LONG AS THE WINDOW DESIRES
“Does one leave in one’s room a shape emptied of its body?”
—Etel Adnan
The character
in absence of scenery
I’ve dreamt this way
to mutiny against this longing
and I wake up to find
the floorboards have inched
that much further away
I’ve lived this way
camouflaged into the furniture
after all this time
I’m the apartment in disguise
and I’ve suspected
the character in dreams
darkening the window with vision
and I wake up to find
everything whittled to sound
the floorboards covered
with it
my vermin selves
such were they
dreamt this way
until the scenery mutinies
and the floorboards multiply
in disguise
the dream character
a homing device
for what’s left wanting
I’ve dreamt the return
of echolocation
the walls
disguised as shadows
and I wake up to find
the new sport
denial’s become
the floorboards radicalized
weaponizing pity
the apartment captains
the ship it dreams of being
and I wake up
weaponizing shadows
to mutiny against this longing
and I wake up to find
the floorboards whittled down
to reveal the skin underneath
each moment is blood kin
to the next
—
Emily Hunerwadel is the author of the chapbook Peach Woman, selected by DoubleCross Press for their Bound Together Series and published alongside Zoe Tuck’s The Book of Bella, as well as Professional Crybaby, selected by Kyle Dargan for the Poetry Society of America’s 2017 Chapbook Fellowship. Currently, they are on the verge of launching Purgatory Valley Press, a book resurrection collective co-founded with Zoe. Born and raised in the Deep South, Emily works as a book designer and writer in Western Massachusetts.