Anti-Extinction

You dream, often, of scalpels. Of carving an absence into your chest—there is weight here that only the body knows. A kind of tenderness made in the dismantlement of a form. You make yourself holy with every change. And, too, every refusal. Rocks have ridges as much as concaves—remain coarse where they are smooth. Dysphoria is a trace fossil—another animal memory burrowed into the earth’s surface. Your anxious hands have kept you alive all these years. And when they touch you, your flesh liquifies—waters itself into every mountain crevice. You allow this carrying.

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Eli V. Rahm (they/them) is a queer poet from Virginia, pursuing an MFA in Poetry at George Mason University. Eli is the recipient of the 2022 Mary Roberts Rinehart Poetry Award and the 2020 Joseph A. Lohman III Award in Poetry. They have attended the Berlin Writers Workshop in Berlin, Germany, and the Juniper Writing Institute in Amherst, Massachusetts. Their work is featured in Barren, The Academy of American Poets, Portland Review, Feral, Angel Rust, Capsule Stories, among others. You can find them tweeting about horror films and strange animals @dinodysphoria