Aposematism
By Elizabeth O’Connell-Thompson
It happens from time to time, inevitable as a hangnail. Someone asks, Where’d you learn to dance like that? As if I haven’t been in this body my whole life. I was as puzzled as them when a first man asked to split a cab with me. We were headed the same way, throats rumbled from a night of howling. Both sobered when he offered to pay. His gaze caught on my smiling denial, my refusal to hold debts of any kind. Weeks later, I called and he came. Heat and laughter. Lips open wide enough to see my silver-filled teeth glinting in the dark. The spectacle of my hair wild, mouth glittering like a cave. I can hardly blame them. Give me the leather jacket, the spiked collar, the mane of serpents, the gloved hands— all warning coloration to help them discern alright, Jack from dead fellow. In cold weather I leave condensation on the subway seat, heat steaming off me like a titan. Monstrous and no longer a woman, I have no grin or grimace; instead, a fixed mouth that someone likened to a rosebud as they watched me pretend to sleep, roil in dream.
Elizabeth O’Connell-Thompson is a poet living in Chicago. The author of the chapbook, Honorable Mention (dancing girl press), her work has been published in Howl: New Irish Writing, Iron Horse Literary Review, Poetry Ireland Review, and Room, among others. She is an associate editor for Rhino Poetry, where she cohosts the Rhino Reads series with Naoko Fujimoto. Read more at EOTwrites.com.
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