THREE POEMS by ALYSSA BECKITT
Entropy of the Farmed Girl
I get horny when I hear my name,
chase it down with a more
gin than tonic & squeeze
the lime into the shape of myself.
I drag my finger
across dirty tires, write my name
on the pavement
with the black residue
next to my beloved’s to see
how they look together—dirty.
A branch breaks in a storm
& I imagine my femur cracked.
I run over a branch
with my van & imagine it’s you—
splinters in the bloodstream
in the stream
in the blood.
I wonder if I’d birth a child
or what that choice
would even feel like—
the gritty edge of broken
glass, or
a soft fungus popping
through the soil?
I change my oil, slick.
Sit in my car & watch
someone else do it.
I believe when people say
I’m a gemini, duplicitous,
multiple,
multiplying,
lying, never
one.
At times I think:
What if I swallowed my twin in the womb?
What if I can only consume?
How many days until the end?
Doom, gloom, perfume –
do you think I smell nice?
I walk on gravel barefoot –
build callouses to run.
I flee, I look
a head
& see a mangled guard rail
is a thing of beauty—
collisions, inevitable pockets of choice, choice
I sometimes twist, sometimes tongue
in my mouth until they are raw.
Choice iron-y to the taste,
metallic grit of the inhuman.
Humans make me love
machines more.
Sometimes binary makes sense: 01101100 01101111 01110110 01100101
Sometimes it doesn’t: 01111001 01101111 01110101
In the horny hearing of my life
I drag a tire outside, kick it with the cracked femur, dirty,
splintering children
residue, you
choosing, choosing, choosing,
calloused pockets to multiply
001100
swallowing iron
colliding with the womb of something
almost human, I am, a machine.
Welcome to the farmed girl’s metropolis.
The Farmed Girl Has a Sex Dream About Marie Curie
Her brow furrowed
in radioactivity,
engrossed in beakers
of death,
pipettes await the pinch
of thumb & forefinger.
The girl brushes the frizzled
ends of Marie’s locks
from her face,
an imperceptible glow
emanates from the two
& they are the experiment now—
Element & language
under an eye’s microscope,
Marie counts the cells
accumulated on the girl’s
visage & she crafts
a villanelle between her thighs,
words skin-soluble & sweet.
They note their heightened pulse,
the polonium pleasured clitoris’s
irradiate the lab
killing all threats
to pleasure
& the remains
of selves seep into the air,
inseparable & invisible.
She seeks the science
of desire, a doubling self,
the radical, possible, inevitable
edible, contagion
tingling on the buds
of all that flowers,
all that is capable of opening,
warm & attentive—
An immeasurable mass
gilded subject/object
begging an itivity
to give it clarity,
some jargon
of a meticulous
need for knowledge,
articulation, gesticulating
wild eradications, vaporous
refractions in multiplying
spheres, valence forces
spiderwebbing to
unending edges
until the girl is met
with a waking fog—
quickly, she grasps
for what was never there.
In the Farmed Girl’s Metropolis, Cars Take Lovers
Bumper rub her hatchback
automatic
How her steel ignites
relinquishes aesthetics
with keyless entry
revrevrevrevrev
reverse
until her stick
shifts
This is
collision—
Electric current
pumps & propulsion
feel the suspense on
her muffler
alternate or radiate or
lift the hood
& intake
stroke compression stroke combustion stroke exhaust
filter the inverse
of her axle into a man
still at the helm.
Open valves prove power
grinds up
Alyssa Beckitt (she/her) is a PhD candidate at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette where her research focuses on the intersections of capitalism and decolonial poetics and their influences on institutions. She received her MFA from the University of North Carolina Greensboro. Her creative work values the power of language to interrogate and critique what it means to be a human existing in late late capitalism. Her work can be found in Four Way Review, Red Rock Review, and Signet Magazine, and is forthcoming in Feminist Formations and Drunk Monkey. @infinitebeckitt.