Image: Margaret Orr

I see a photograph of your hands

and grow irrational

I loosen around

life without you

and that is okay

and I excuse myself

I tell a lot of people about the biology

involved in finding other people

about the comfort I take in an NPR article

Do We Choose Our Friends Because They Share Our Genes?

yes

this is what I believe but

I get stuck I have trouble I look into

my glass of whiskey like

many people have before me

all it took was one

orgasm all it took was one

shared thing that wasn’t

orgasm

an art object we looked at

at the same time

and agreed it was just sleazy

enough to be parody

I understand the world

could work like this

there’s a soft bio-factory where

items are slipped into items

in a timely manner

people are shifted

into one another’s life

we wear each other

like clothes we take turns in

each other’s skins we

look at ourselves from inside

one another

and in it

we are sheathed

we are feared

we are sheathed

and we get closer

to something not divine not truth

but birth

     

Dara Cerv

Dara Cerv is the author of the chapbook Bath Poems (Sixth Finch, 2015). She lives in New York.

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