Dear Eve

(Language scavenged from Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick’s “Touching Feeling”)

Recently I am a line wrestling language,
circulating toward a brush with corduroy acts.
I am looking for the little room under the drag clubs
made of sinkholes in the silk.

On television I christen the new vacuum (on/off).
In photographs I soak egg cups in guilt.
I fold all the fissures, but there is no circumference
to my shame, unstable traces still left floating.

Still here I am, rivaling, mimicking. As if through you
I might someday axis humanlike desire,
despite dense pockets of shame-prone skin
still wet/dry.

Dani Smotrich-Barr grew up in Michigan and recently graduated from Wesleyan University. They have work published or forthcoming in Vagabond City, Ghost City Review, Birdcoat Quarterly, giallo and elsewhere, and received the 2020 Dorchester Prize from Wesleyan.