This Body Its Charges

Carolyn Ferrucci

11.04.21

A whole warm room to discuss our

awareness, mine was April, the thrill of the word

in my mouth. The birth ward holds troughs of blood and howling

people talking about vacation time. The new

born is pure decision. I was born

surface tension, torque, lush bleak childhood.


This is a temporary I that doesn’t know a thing.

I am counting, childlike, being born like

building pus in the square dirt allotted

for a tree not there, she wants

to do something probably impossible, but

these two are definitely in the early stages of it.

Of what of love. If I name

one thing I know, will

you stay. You name one thing

we don’t know and we live.


I say please and please is a city.

Please is a word I woke up

with under my tongue under

a morning so gray I didn’t know

the time. It is time

when the astonishical Pink buds

the peach tree into petal, time when I

pick up a stick and try to express how I really feel.


But speech came later, on the edge

of fall, when a puddle Unperfectly reflects a municipal building lit up with no one

inside, it’s impossible to sustain a single self.


Yes! Leaves astound your hair now

Nonononono sounds a bird, forgiveness and

promise bound me, and

then in the snow a reminder of our

humanity walks on, into our January room,

where I sear a bright tuna into gray,

where I add acid, feel my body despite myself.

Carolyn Ferrucci is a Queens-based poet whose work can be found in No Dear, The Felt, Form IV, Wendy’s Subway’s The Quick and the Dead (Pizarnik Edition) and Fieldnotes (UK). They work as a paralegal for minors in immigration detention and co-curate the “Here I Am Again” reading series.

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