Diagram of My Epidermis

Lynn Gao Cox
| poetry

 

canopy//

I lay in the dark of my childhood bedroom, hungry
for a woman—for linked arms, grins with all our teeth,
and howling at a movie projector moon.

 

understory//

Here the moonlight spits through the slats
in the shutters and I am digested whole instead—
plucked into monomers and peptides. Sundew sermon.
Gaping swarm of atoms. Negative space woman.

 

shrub//

By this point I’ve learned my body down to
the plaque between my cells: algal blooms, dead
sturgeon, annelids churning earth. What a shame
about her daughter, a godless girl-lover.

 

herb//

A faceless ghost

 

floor//

Call me what you want: (1) peat swamp girl
(2) pulpwood creature (3) salamander eater
(4) detritus demon (5) the type of person
a decent girl should never take a compliment from.

 

corneum//

The fact is I’m tired of lying, of counting
the layers in my skin like I am being stolen.

 

lucidum//

 

 

 

granulosum//

I want to know what it’s like to be pared
and savored raw. Anger and all.
Wine flesh. Plum mouth. Wolf woman.
Sacred in a way that is very much not.

 

spinosum//

I want to sprout unfiltered mouths from
my face; slick, shameless & indubitably
lovely—they’d call me debutante, wife of
man, family girl, head of tongues.

 

basale//

In my dreams I walk around New York
labeling things: radius, hummingbird,
tomato, pearl onion, Central Park, eyeball moon,
cracked rib. Can I ever speak my name?

Lynn Gao Cox is from North Carolina and is currently a master’s student studying applications of artificial intelligence to medicine. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association, among others.

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