Brynne Rebele-Henry
from Flesh Graphs
158. My breasts aren’t the same size, first I go for the socks, the tissues, the ball-
shaped objects that are stuffable, then I go for the silicone, the surgeon’s table, the
constant shifting of bra sizes.
159. He asks if I want to drink his piss.
160. I take a knife to the insides of my thighs, try to assemble some kind of gap, a
space where the skin doesn’t meet.
161. I lick the spaces of her that don’t connect.
162. We watch TV on his mother’s couch with the needle-pointed penis cushions.
She offers us fruit cake slices. Bits of fur protrude from the edges.
163. Freak of nature: my eyes change colors when I cry or do speed.
164. Repetition, I could burn down her apartment, get a bikini wax, join a band
where everyone is really good at saying “fuck,” or I could cut my hair, change my will,
read Proust and drink bad tequila.
165. He said she was too beautiful to die.
166.When we get stoned I think that I am a dolphin with pearls for incisors.
167. I drink milk and vinegar, add a dead moth and grass from his lawn.
168. Mary says her belly feels weird and we both say “what?” and she says she feels
teeth inside of it, then asks if we have E. Her face is shaped like angry moons and the
place where a diamond once was in her nose is bleeding and we see white specks of
pus or something like it.
169. I type my name without capitals: a failured existence.
170. He wants to be spanked before he eats his dinner.
171. My teeth are rotten from spiked punch, I leave them scattered like fallen planets
on the yard of his dilapidated house.
172. I ate her chickens, butter-drenched I leave their remains on her kitschy gingham
table, my stomach pregnant with spray-on oil.
173. She pierced my ears with a fork.
174. I got so high I realized that nothing is real except for Jesus’s abs and pink glitterglue.
175. I eat confetti, my mouth a pulpy green mass.
176. Betty calls me a pyro, my steaming eyes and fishing trips where I come back
smelling like driftwood fires. I put Elmers glue in her ears.
177. I want to swallow his acne, to consume him like a small animal would eat insects.
178. Her face is a crescent moon at best, but my eyes are barely constellations.
179. She needs help buttoning her jeans, my hands squeaking against the rubber of
her, the shudder smell that follows her home from the classrooms where she adopts
small children who can’t speak.
180. The expanse of skin not covered in fur on his body is little to none.
181. She swallows the turpentine first, then closes the space of my hands in paper
cutters, her butter chin quivering with an emotion I don’t yet know.
182. His thumb turns green first, then his forearms and neck, his lips a gray smog,
this is how it ends, he says, fingers hooked in a bed frame from the 1950s.
183. She wants to be a rainbow sparkle unicorn, sprinkles and nothing else, perpetual
lipstick, small-armed kind of girl, but her face is a broken oval.
184. I haven’t eaten for a week and my flesh is beginning to hang off the wire of my
joints.
185. He calls it the witching hour, the time when mirrors turn red and his skin a prick
of cold against the down of his bed. He sees swans in her sleeping eyes.
186. Rum is my mouthwash, she says, leatherneck protruding from the dentist’s
chair, her canines stabbing out of her gums.
187. His sparrow neck broke when the ladder was tied wrong, his body a sea of
bruises, now he eats only tapioca and Fox News, his chin indignant at the
homosexuals and the shapes their mouths are taking. He can’t move his arms but
keeps a shotgun under his rocker in case of an incident.
188. The spaces we have broken: an arm, eight fingers, three tongues, one rib cage,
the fresh absence of a tramp stamp, the bone before the wrist, a nose, five shoulders
and a silver wrench.
189. After the bird-boned baby I tied myself to a train track hoping for disaster, the
blow of a body and the stains it makes on iron.
My favorite souvenir is a small metal abstract sculpture that my father brought me from Lipica, Slovenia. The skulls and bodies of the horses in the sculpture are peeling away and crammed together and their nostrils are small bits of metal that have been scraped away by what looks like a fork. There are also random letters stamped around the vaguely demonic creatures.
Brynne Rebele-Henry’s poetry, fiction, and visual art have appeared in The Volta, Alexandria Quarterly, and other magazines. Her manuscript FleshGraphs emerged from being a young gay feminist intrigued by both online confessions and a society obsessed with women’s bodies. She is Assistant Editor of Verse.