Sestina with the Year’s First Sunburn
Hot days, I want to crack my body
open like an egg, poach my heart
in swirling vinegar. I watch men’s
tank top straps slice their shoulders
into fruit salad, muscles ripening
toward a steam-shrouded mirror.
As a teenager, I hated the mirror
for what it showed me of my body:
by high school, my skin had ripened
into its own failure and my weeping heart
had been sliced and draped across my shoulders,
broken by fear of the world of men.
In adulthood, I’ve known men
who have managed not to be mirrors
of their fathers, who have shouldered
loves that live beyond their bodies
and gathered them around a new hearth
so that a community might ripen.
Still, as I watch the world ripen
and rot with ill-gotten rage, I always blame the men
who have armored their gilded hearts
with the pain of others, and put up mirrors
to block sunlight from the fruiting bodies
on the forest floor beneath their shoulders.
I wish the edges of my shoulders
were more ghostly, so I could ripen
into any shape I chose, take this body
fallen far from the trees of men
and polish it until the skin mirrors
the weeping child at its heart.
I want to break my own heart
into pieces and sit them on the shoulders
of my friends, so that in mirrors
they will see that I love their ripening
sweetness, and that no men
can pull us from each others’ bodies.
On sleepless nights, I make the ceiling my mirror, float desire into its blank heart
to empty my body of all it is too afraid to name. Someday, I will shoulder
only burdens that ripen me. Someday, I will be loved beyond the world of men.
Isaiah Newman (they/them) is a queer, Jewish writer and social worker living in the Boston area and organizing in solidarity with Palestine. They write both fiction and poetry, and their work has appeared in Joyland, Waxwing, Rust and Moth, and The Lumiere Review. You can find them at isaiahnewman.com on Instagram @thegreatskittishbakeoff.