by Damian Kelly
Nervous
Make me an octopus
with a brain in every limb.
Decentralize me.
Split I into We.
Send my cerebrum circulating.
Chunk it up,
mush the meat down and squeeze
pieces into the flesh under my lifelines.
Make my palms
hot with knowledge
of their own.
Brain shards: lodge in my armpit
or ankle as you please.
Gossip from your new homes
with the other limbic seeds—
or preserve your secrets.
My shy right thumb,
my impulsive shoulder,
the affable globs of
neurons behind my knees—
we are a temporary universe
within a temporary universe.
Farewell to the cord
with a soul at its end.
What’s left in my head can rest now,
as this commune of gray knots
blips and sparks
across the holy mistake called body.
Jessica Franken is an essayist, poet, and intermittent fiction writer living in Minneapolis. She has work published or forthcoming in River Teeth, Great Lakes Review, and Bitch magazine, among other places. Her writing centers on animals, nature, and place, and is based on the tenet of radical attention.
Damian Kelly lives on a Hill Farm in Scotland, he studied ceramics at Edinburgh College of Art many years ago. More recently he has returned to drawing and painting as well as green woodworking. A selection of his pieces are exhibited at the Hirsel Gallery in Coldstream on the England/ Scotland border.