organist

vince, i could see the world without its edges.
i placed an empty woolen glove
across my naked lap not to remind anyone
of being handled, but to remind them of bonelessness.
To show how easily anything can be turned
inside out. Spread across an unsunned body,
a tanned hand belies the filth of light. Becomes
its own glove of damage done
by exposure. Freckled witness, gothic romance.
The heroine wears a large medallion like an angel
wears a body—a silver snare
that loops her back into the world of lines. vince,
it’s because it’s easier
to think over a figure divided, to
organize into erotic zones, to make
a tattoo that goes:
and here is naked and here is naked. Heretical adorn
ment. Once a vulnerable
fence has been built, i can name the insides. i wound
my hair around and around to make it obvious that they could
ccut the braid at its base but i would still
be braided. i would still have the word
b r a i d. i mean the extra
embellishments make the emptiness, make the model
more bare, make it feel more to be touched. i sit on
my hands and feel the empty glove. Sure, it makes it easier
to imagine his keyed fingers.
It makes the materials of the world the bars
of a song being alive is the same as singing.

projectionist

Girl in the fashion library chewing
chocolates and spitting. A reel re wo und , alive on
only film. On a slick of cocoa,
the aftermath of wa x.

A stage set seen from the side
is diagramatic of how the world plays. Invisible
drapery between the watched world and the w
atcher.

Ignore the idea of observing
from above. Don’t make the girl a specimen
in a godded petri dish. To
understand bacteria, become bacterial.

The projector’s beam is blended into our light
by dust. D irty image. To understand, i swallow
strings and strings of lights. i become the orb
in between.

An artist’s life is about eating, is about the twisted
constellation inside the stomach. Is glowing
metabolized. You really are
here. You can wear the curtain that cuts you off

from the bulbs like it is a bridal
gown. vince, you can get married to a tthing
they say doesn’t even exist. You can make a promise
to yourself.

Candice Wuehle is the author of the full-length collection BOUND (Inside the Castle Press, August 2018) and the chapbooks VIBE CHECK (Garden-door Press, 2017), EARTH*AIR*FIRE*WATER*ÆTHER (Grey Books Press, 2015) and curse words: a guide in 19 steps for aspiring transmographs, (Dancing Girl Press, 2014). Poems from her collection, DEATH INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX, appear in Best American Experimental Writing 2020, Black Warrior Review, The Bennington Review, and The New Delta Review. She is originally from Iowa City, Iowa and is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Candice currently resides in Lawrence, Kansas where she is a Chancellor’s Fellow at The University of Kansas.