boxes become three-dimensional, their joints taped
and double-taped, their corners crisp: open mouths agape, they stand ready
to receive needed objects—
[hats: bubble-wrapped but mis-matched
plates: books by friends
and strangers, rubbing covers under rolled-up shirts: yellow-handled
knives in newsprint: pillows
and picture frames: a bronze hare with her blind
eyes fixed on ceiling cracks: boxers and cotton
balls: a folder of old photographs]
meanwhile, half a year away, the boxes’ future selves—torn and misshapen
but otherwise intact—sag against a sack truck’s rigid back: after seven
months contained, hostage to sick, sequestered trades, packed
objects have settled into new shapes: their corners
crushed: their pages warped: their fabric frayed—
[there is risk in filling any box: belongings, once devoured, reemerge
as scat: buried items fall apart when disinterred: needed
objects, lost to time and transit, leave a scar]
and when, half an epilogue away, my future self—forlorn and mistaken
but otherwise abstract—drags a duffle and a fat backpack off a baggage
carousel [our fabric torn, our corners frayed] my boxes
and their objects have, without my knowledge or consent, become quintessence
of uncertainty, both position and momentum
unknown quantities—
[until we reconnect: when our dimensions may be altered but our scratched
and dented bodies recognize their former shape: when we still pass
as needed objects]
so, today and yesterday, in an old / new world of hurricanes and summer
haze, I tape my boxes closed against all doubt: stack them, hope
on rage, next to the dresser and the bed frame and the bookshelves
and the lamps: all shabbiness disguised by movers’ wrap—
and tomorrow or today, in a new / old world of frigid rain and memories
that sap, I straighten aching shoulders: tear old tape away: unpack
contained by our skins and our skulls, we are discrete microclimates ruled by our blood’s temperature our body-maps’ coordinates are not fixed: our borders shift and our rivers divert: our topographies are both known and not known: our cells secret caves: our synapses bridges and ravines: we are tree and storm: like countless shards of glass in a kaleidoscope, our patterns shake loose whenever we move, startling upwards to become sun-dazzled murmurations: we are infinities of suns: together a universe: fellow human, how should I praise your countless shards?
this building appears known: a space that is body: my brain but infinity someone has daubed an intervention on the bathroom wall: space should not talk: to not think is ecstatic inhabit or exist: museum and afraid connect: exhibit limits petty make words angry, teenage painted: a sign/space dispute: people as noisy signs imagine noise: more image than matter small different wants: head games free floating: touching outside the heart to be old in the museum: play death as an installation: space alone changes space when connected is always burnished: not space, bodies this body looks metal: fingers don’t find comfortable spaces the body is inside me: I am myself a habitable space: genderless what wall is appropriate for my art?
Jude Marr (they, them) is a Pushcart-nominated nonbinary poet. Jude’s first full-length collection, We Know Each Other By Our Wounds, came out from Animal Heart Press in 2020. Recent work appears in Leavings, Icefloe Press’s Work and the Anthropocene, Boats Against the Current, and Moria. Jude is currently on the masthead at SWWIM Miami and Poetry is Currency.
Details from illustrated book covers of the 1890s, all published by Harper and Sons, New York. From the American Decorated Publishers Bindings Collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
