oh you want me to do the talking well i am myself today because i am in love with a man who
touches me good & knows me in & out exactly what i'm made of: felt. i'm felt. & when he's not
around i'm not myself at all do you know what i mean. shucks. like i'm just a husk of shucked
corn & i get so much smaller then & then the words don't come they stay stuffed inside or
stitched to me what's the word for when you don't feel yourself when you don't feel inside when
you feel like a seam of yourself when you seem but are not when you are a hem? when i am
myself i spin my yarny hair on my fingertip & feel the sun & the breeze like fabric around me &
look at all the pretty leaves of all the pretty trees & see them hanging like fingers in air. i touch
them & am felt & sometimes even kiss them with my soft soft mouth. but when i'm not myself
then the world gathers in me & my man's hand makes me gag & when it slides out of me well
then my tummy goes flappy & limp like a rag & my whole body becomes a stuttering mess &
once i bled for days because i had bled i mean led i mean let him in. sometimes i'm felt too much
sometimes i want not to be felt & when i'm not felt then the silence gets in & there are no
words & what is the word what is the word what is the word for that

Clare Collins Hogan is a writer from Maryland. She received her MFA and a postgraduate Zell Fellowship in poetry from the University of Michigan Helen Zell Writers’ Program, where she won an Academy of American Poets Prize. Her work has appeared with Heavy Feather Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Dunes Review, and is forthcoming from the EcoTheo Review. Follow her on Instagram and Twitter @squarehogan.