I have been studying how
to abominate. I take a class
on the weekends where
we touch the frozen coals
of hell with our tongues
and hold hands. I’m taking up
painting too, because I like
being changed by what
I touch. We start every
abomination class
by breaking something: a window,
our father’s watches, a fire
alarm. Never a natural thing,
though we meet outside
even in the rain, which
holds us like a mouth.
As a budding abomination,
I am practicing how to be
more than myself, how to
crawl up walls, how to
defile like honey the names
I’ve been given. A typical
exercise involves shedding
first the skin, the bone, the
forests of nerves, the basement
stomach, putting it somewhere
safe, like in a pile of leaves.
What’s left is unnamed, light
but not light, scent but not scent,
memory but not memory,
____ but not ____ and, and,
and in this not-form we ______
and ______ until we _______
and ______ like stars, like
love, all sharing not-one
not-form, threading the needle
of each other like _______.
After class, we carry our
bodies home to set them
in bed, pillowed. I wash my
face and stick my fingernail
between my gums like air. I check
to see if my abomination
teeth have grown in. Not yet.
Not yet, I say aloud. My reflection
flat as a word.
***
Tyler Raso (they/them) is a poet, essayist, and teacher. Their work is featured or forthcoming in POETRY, Black Warrior Review, DIAGRAM, Salt Hill Journal, The Journal, and elsewhere. They are the author of the chapbook In my dreams/I love like an idea, winner of the 2022 Frontier Digital Chapbook Contest. They currently write, teach, and study in Bloomington, IN, tweeting @spaghettiutopia and websiting at tylerraso.com
***
image: MM Kaufman
Rejection Letters 