Esmé Kaplan-Kinsey – Two Poems
radiation
my roommate drinks white wine
from a uranium glass,
tells us the radiation settles
in his bones.
under the back porch, a patchwork
cat looks for a safe place
to give birth. the space rasps open
between a basement door
and its frame, a wedge
driven into the airless dark.
but then—the rain while the sun
is still blurring in hot,
white. in this light, I feel
resuscitation under my skin—
spine uncurling like a fern,
arteries a river after snowmelt.
all uranium glasses, my roommate
tells me, were made before
American uranium was confiscated
for the Manhattan Project.
you find them now, still,
in thrift stores and antique shops—
artifacts, scarification, the shards
still embedded in the flesh.
the glass itself is harmless,
less radioactive, says my roommate,
than a human body. but still,
he is drinking from the green blossom
and telling us with delight of the few
lucky particles now lodging
in the mineral of his skeleton,
the very foundation of him.
and I think—and I am in the sinking
evening sunlight now,
with the early spring leaves
bubbling sweet yellow—
that there is something to be said
for toasting the ways in which
the world leaves its mark on the body.
there is something to be said for raising
a poisonous glass to the light,
casting your eyes across the kitchen
for the place where its reflection settles.
body modification
as it turns out, complex consciousness is bad
for the skin. bad for other things too, no doubt:
surrealism & satisfaction & a full night’s sleep,
but the scars, the metal threaded through flesh,
the whispering ink of the tattoo–how
the living marks the body, leaves the body
desiring the marks of the moment lived.
& I am not yet disillusioned. I am off
to a decent start. the goal, I think, is to meet
as many people as possible in my twenties
while I am still lively & good-looking.
in a nearly forgotten forest, four or five years back,
a friend I no longer speak to hooks a silver crescent
through the cartilage of my right ear. then i am ten
again, arm broken, unstitching the surgical thread
for a glimpse of my ill-lit insides. I have always
wanted so badly to be shiny. to darken
my surroundings in comparison. is that
disillusionment, to admit this? I have painted
my skin & I have knotted my voice & I have
straightened my hair. I want to be normal
& revered. Isn’t that normal of me?
two years later the surgeon pulls the metal plate
glistening from my bones, & I keep it
in a plastic jar in my bedroom until I move
to college. before that irreparable
upset, I ink the horizon-line of my childhood
onto my ankle, living curves & oak-tree
teeth fraying the hem of the sky. on that
ridge, where my father used to walk the dog,
I found a ring one summer, set with a ruby
tiny as an insect’s faceted eye. that silver still
gleaming from my hand. shoulders sun-
reddened. forearms blackberry-scarred.
I adorn myself with hometown relics.
I am the child of the gold in the California
hills. what I want, or have always wanted,
without intention–my consciousness stumbling
its own path towards warmth–is to be beautiful
like the world. no, not that–
to contain as much of the world’s beauty
as I can stomach, & then a little more,
beauty pouring out always from me, leaving
beauty trailing behind so that another,
eyes cast down in search of brightness, might
harvest it, glowing, from the earth’s sun-baked
skin.
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Esmé Kaplan-Kinsey is a California transplant studying creative writing in Portland, Oregon. Their work appears or is forthcoming in publications such as Beaver Magazine, JMWW, and Gone Lawn. They are a prose reader for VERDANT, a mediocre guitarist, an awe-inspiring procrastinator, and a truly terrible swimmer. They can be found on X/Instagram @esmepromise
Artwork: kintsugi II by Giuseppina Brandi
Giuseppina Brandi lives in Naples, Italy, with her five-year-old son. She has a Master's Degree in Comparative Literatures, with a Dissertation on Poetry in Europe during WWI. She is currently taking a Professional Course in Literary Translation. Autodidact, she has always loved drawing and painting, and she takes inspiration from natural world and human emotions. With a great passion for poetry too, she believes in the power that art and poetry have of healing and connecting. Her artwork has been published in Black Bough Poetry edition Sound and Vision, Acropolis Journal: Issue Seven, Blue Motel Rooms Poetry and Art inspired by Joni Mitchell, The Poetica Sisterhood of Sylvia & Anne, Fever of the Mind Poetry, Art&Music: Issue 8, Cover art of the Spellbinder literary Magazine: Autumn issue 2023, Acropolis Journal: Issue Eight, Moss Puppy Magazine.