{"sf1_id":1973554,"sf2_id":"rn6Ep6mv","title":"IN THE CITY WHERE THEY PAVED THE ROADS WITH OUR TONGUES AND TEETH","author":"wrenquire","words":389,"posted_at":"2023-04-06T03:08:00.000Z","tags":["Poetry"],"url":"https://fse.anthro.fr/stories/1973554-in-the-city-where-they-paved-the-roads-with-our-tongues-and-teeth","original_url":"https://sofurry.com/s/rn6Ep6mv","image_url":"https://cdn.sofurryfiles.com/submissions/thumbnails/d7/86/d7864fde-619d-4b6c-9a23-142ea0688df4","description":"#1 of Poetry\n\nafter Daniel Borzutzky's \"The Performance of Becoming Human\"","content":"There's a body\n\n  \n\nIn the body: the teeth of a piano\n\n  \n\nSomeone has stolen the rest of the piano\n\n  \n\nIf our body was stolen would you run from what stood in its place:\n\n  \n\nivory keys and claws and pinions and beak and talons and fangs snarling shrieking tasting\n\n  \n\nWould you take the dagger we bought you as a gift and drive it into our chest beside a pond with the ducks watching, waiting to see if you shred us like a loaf of wheat bread\n\n  \n\nIt's better for the ducks, you say\n\n  \n\nYou and you and you and you and you, all of you\n\n  \n\nListen: My back molar dropped from my body gently as tears in this old city, its undercarriage black as the coal in the bottom of your throat\n\n  \n\nThe sun hasn't set there, on that tooth yet. The sun listens to the desert rouse to life with all the resentment we hold at our nocturnal cats\n\n  \n\nWe would be nocturnal if not for the rattling in our chest, if not for how big the world is\n\n  \n\nHow can we travel all over this fractured and split world with this fractured and split body and think our problem with it is simply the scenery\n\n  \n\nThe scenery, we lecture to no one, is where we climb into a landscape painting, flaking off paint with our mandibles, burrowing till our little tick legs are the only thing sticking out this skin\n\n  \n\nToday we dug a burrow in our backyard. Dogs staring as if we were a deer browsing the rusted wares of a flea market. Neighbors staring as if they needed to drive a dagger into our chest\n\n  \n\nWe think and think and think and the dirt under our nails spreads to our palms, our wrists, up our limbs--gangrenous this rot we dig and dig and\n\n  \n\nWe dug a burrow and hid our bones to chew on later, to hide our body and all its blisters\n\n  \n\nWe are not being metaphorical about the digging\n\n  \n\nWhen your body is a sled hauled by a team of dogs, nothing is metaphorical\n\n  \n\nAccept me/us as I/We are or leave\n\n  \n\nWe have nothing else but the hilt of this blade blossoming from our ribs, the rotten tooth hidden in our burrow\n\n  \n\nIts opening the arms of a flower reaching outward, wailing for embrace\n\n  \n  \n\n","series":{"name":"Poetry","next":"https://fse.anthro.fr/stories/2035196-the-body-as-its-own-hostage.json"}}