the body pushes sutures
to surface by isolating

and strangling the foreign material
from blood and capillaries

sent to compost the stitch
in the same way that

neon is a gas made visible
by sealing away other gases

which is why neon is so popular
in space and stars so fashionable

which is not exactly unlike the closets
of queer people who clad

our starbodies with stars, avoiding solidity
in neon capillaries which

when you think of it has everything to do
with monsters who became history

when Pliny the Elder wander’d around
Caucasia, which was not a home

for white people but was a place before race
became a wound devoured and sutured

or became a monster, which might be a geography
of famine, entire continents of people

whose value is predicated on monstrosity
which does not dissolve in the body

or flash with light angular as flaming
but is used to light this planet with economy

rather than stars, in a persistent assimilation
of who is worthy of saving

and all of this is just to say that wounds
wander bodies, ancestor to ancestor

which is why all of us hurt so much
licking open our wounds

poetry-magazineAll of This Is to Say

All of This Is to Say