The rooms run into one another and the fridge is too close to the sofa is too close to the kettle is too close to the tv. Among crumbs and crumpled cotton I am growing; sprouting things, unknowable and damp. When i stir it is with discomfort: heaving breath, heavy step. My bones are light, my flesh is tender; I am bruised and carrying the weight of myself wrong as the hall that leads to the bathroom.

In the mirror I pick and poke at fresh red raw, weeping and prising open: I have a distortion beneath the skin to rip free and set right. There is justice to be done! If I only had the key to do it
to get out get out get out but I don’t want it. I want this: this place of blindness, where only I can see myself. 

I hate the growing wet and vulnerable thing. I am peeling back the membrane, licking off the slime. I will be beautiful: coarse hair and large in a way that doesn’t hurt. I am sour I am sour I am sour as the spider in the corner of the room.

Coppewebbe 
      Coppweb 
            Copweb 
                 Cobweb

The C slinks into the W sinks into the web made by the unlovable, shivering in her works, as I do. I have grown from egg to larvae to skin-shed, short-lived and sexual being, and every new leaf that unfurls is painful, bursting from the bark like cloven hooves running in peat; squishing and squelching and I am afraid. Afraid and angry always.

Wilting and withering beneath the heat of my anguish that crawls, centipedian, beneath my epidermis; wriggling along my breastbone and burrowing into the flesh of heart and lung.

                                                  I hate lunch.

The fridge is always empty; the day is always too long; too short; too much. The blue buzz when I open the door makes me itch and scratch and I feel that thing creeping beneath my skin and
I slam it shut and pace growling and cursing.

I am hungry, too hungry, too meteorically wanting and falling spent into mulch alive with carapace and chiton and rising to pet the hole in the atmosphere my falling left behind. I am ozone smell and hazy hair and glittering teeth! I am sinking and unspooling! I pick at my own seams until they come apart and let all the lives inside flow freely across the cracks.

It is dark and the only light is the white fridge casting long shadows and the hum of its inner machine workings that turn me on so bad. I lie in its pooling shimmer; the kitchen wood is fake but I don't mind; it holds me just the same as the real stuff, just a little quieter, a little colder, a little lacking. But that feels apt. The insects run over my quivering fingers and I reach for them. Empty gesture.

Rabbitfeet (they/she) is a queer poet with a love of nature, identity + queerness, and the viscerality of physicality!