against arrival

I don’t mean to make it sound like I became
a woman. River, maybe, or rotting dam. Gulls
in their plural huddle on the tired sandbar. I drew her
on the shower tile with my hair, half-faced, mouth
lopsided o, then palmed her gone again. Burned
the guides, magazines: 13 Ways to Fuck Your Man
even in a body smeared with their militant ashes.
I want to tell you I flew from that rubble denser, thick
with rage. But it wasn’t like that: the flickering just went on
forever, the in and out, in and out of never-there, always
almost, almost—tripping towards a cliff, eternal glitter
edge, exhausted verge of

Zoë Fay-Stindt is a queer, bicontinental poet with roots in both the French and American south. Their work has been Pushcart, Best of the Net, and Best New Poets nominated, featured or forthcoming in places such as Southern Humanities, Ninth Letter, Terrain, and Poet Lore, and gathered into a chapbook, Bird Body, winner of Cordella Press’ inaugural Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize.