#LoveMachine
Faylita Hicks
“the word ‘body’ is dehumanizing” & of course
the editor is correct—that a body is not the same as a person
but I wasn’t talking about people. I was
talking about the body I arrived to the afterparty in—
the one Velcroed to my person, trying to Velcro to other persons.
I say “my body leaks when it sees their body” & the professor
gets hard around the mouth at my obsession with fluids & bodies,
says “there is nothing new here” & of course
the professor is correct—that there is nothing new.
I like all of my things worn in—
except for my technology, which is always
refreshing itself. I tweet my body
is breakingdown & streaks of red
dance under my stitched words,
making me stroke
the small body of my machine
& cradle it like a bird, apologizing.
Inside it, smaller apologies
cradling smaller birds,
stroking. Inside of them,
bodies invisible as birds.
Faylita Hicks (she/her/they) is a writer and justice-impacted organizer. She is the author of the poetry collection, HoodWitch (Acre Books, 2019), and the Managing Editor of Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review. They hold an MFA in Creative Writing from Sierra Nevada College and were awarded fellowships from Lambda Literary and Jack Jones Literary Arts. A finalist for the 2018 PEN America Writing for Justice Fellowship, their writing has been published or is forthcoming in Barrelhouse, The Cincinnati Review, Color Bloq, Foglifter, Foundry, Huffington Post, Longreads, Poetry Magazine, Prairie Schooner, The Rumpus, Slate Magazine, and the Texas Observer, among others.