tierhaut
by Eli Vandegrift
my growth, animal. skin full of cheetah spots. my eczema,
a landscape you can itch. my belly hair, spider legs you can stroke.
my lips drip with an excess only a lover could eat. how sluggish,
the way we crawl
toward anything soft. i still buy every plush creature i see.
like if i can love what’s artificial, i can love what’s real. in german,
everything has a gender, even objects. does this mean every object
you love
loves you back? and i don’t mean toy story; more like
caligari or metropolis, where the environments are as alive as the
characters. loose fluid creatures in the dark. electric bodies made
animal and
mechanical. the body as a kind of technology. how skin has
as much of a pronoun as a city. as much as a dog’s wagging tail.
how everything with a shadow makes a practice of crawling.
Eli Vandegrift (they/them/theirs) is a queer poet from Virginia. They are currently an MFA candidate in poetry at George Mason University. They are interested in hybrid genres, hybrid creatures, and the relentless fluidity of being.