You will be a shuddering bird
with an ugly neck. You will disassemble

the couch in the therapist's office
cushion by cushion, build an itchy fortress

with a thousand rooms. You will be a dust mite,
a piece of thread, a hangnail. Imagining the experience

of objects distinct from you will keep
you alive, slipping from body to body. Brittle

and uncurious disk. Plywood. The faint,
impotent particles of radiation that emanate

from microwaves and phones. Eventually,
escaping yourself will exhaust you.

You will be deserted by your own capacity
to desert, and in this abandonment become

an abridgment of yourself, a ground of retreated senses,
your dead sex curled in the road like an animal.

Your dreams will have double vision; sleep
will spill out from their cracked glass to follow

you everywhere. In your sleep you expect
to grow fur. In your sleep you expect

to transform, transform. In your rooms
of wet wool you will make dry movements

like insects’ legs and stare,
with your compound eyes, at the light.

Published March 21st, 2021

Fiona Chamness is a writer and musician from Ann Arbor, Michigan. Her work is published or forthcoming in PANK, Vinyl, the Beloit Poetry Journal, Prairie Schooner, the Indiana Review, Anomaly, Crab Orchard Review, and elsewhere, as well as in several anthologies and in the poetry collection Feral Citizens, co-authored with Aimée Lê. She was the recipient of the Beloit Poetry Journal's Chad Walsh Prize in 2014. She also writes and performs with queer feminist punk band Cutting Room Floor. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Rutgers University, Newark.

Yevgeniya Baras is an artist and curator based in New York. Born in Syzran, Russia, Baras attended Slade School of Fine Arts (University of London), earned a BA and an MS at the University of Pennsylvania, and an MFA at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Along with numerous group shows and residencies, Baras has held solo exhibitions at Reyes Finn Gallery in Detroit, Nicelle Beauchene Gallery in New York, The Locker Plant in Marfa, 68Projects in Berlin, and Station Gallery in Sydney, among others. Baras is also a member of the faculty at Sarah Lawrence College and the Rhode Island School of Design. More of Baras’ work is available on her website or through Nicelle Beauchene Gallery.