Zoë Fay-Stindt

Tell me about the god
of your childhood: that cool
shotgun metal along the fatty
innocence of your cheek,
preparing its fire for a body
just outside the woodline’s cover.
Or the shark teeth you dust off
from your ocean-dumped gravel road,
an edge to learn from. Or the hunger
in you. Or the perversions. Everyone
around you is becoming self-made,
collecting marks along their skins

though you never learn why,
only that there’s a kind of jeweling
that happens: small red gems,
collecting force. At home, one parent
steals you up the stairs
while the other pulls at your ankle
from the bottom. The salve:
a blue Poo Chi that gets caught in the rain
and makes one long glitchy whine after,
moving its mechanical body in slow motion.
Or the great big turtle shell you found
on the shore and buried in the sandbox,
telling no one so you might keep something,
though you wonder about the gone
body.

The shark teeth help you test your casing.
You are trying to figure something out.
But with those small daggers,
you’ve managed only the slightest
opening, a scratch that quickly heals
into a thin and unimpressed mouth.

Eventually, they move on:
one bulges with pregnancy,
one recovers, one dies.
You never find out what happened
to the body you brought that fire into,
the one you watched briefly rise
with each bump the pickup flew over,
the one you showed your parents
when they came to pick you up,
proud, a little uneasy.

Months later, when you go digging
for the shell, the shield,
something has dragged it off
while you weren’t looking.