THREE POEMS by ESMÉ KAPLAN-KINSEY
Posthuman Sits for an Oil Portrait
Posthuman wants to be immortalized in chartreuse. Nothing in their closet is neon enough to suit them, so they submerge a white tee-shirt in an algae-filled pond, pass an hour skittering rocks across the green-velvet surface. The shirt comes rippling back out the color of springtime. Posthuman is pleased to be dressed in pond scum and brackish water and the smell of decomposition. Their appointment with the painter is scheduled for noon, but they get stuck in traffic and leak all over the car upholstery. When they arrive, the painter offers them a new shirt, blue, which they decline. I have been practicing my Mona Lisa smile, says Posthuman, do you want to see? And they make a face that is not their face. Beautiful, the painter says, just like that. His brush hits the canvas nimble and desperate as a water strider traversing a pond. I have always wanted to be seen like this, Posthuman says out the side of their mouth. I have always wanted to see myself in those original mirrors: the surface of water, the fishbowl of another’s eye.
Love Poem from Inside the Trojan Horse
If I could metamorphose into an echo of myself, would you be nailed inside my skin? You are not the first I’ve wheeled past the walls within me. I am no virgin, it’s true. There’s a version of me in every pasture. When struck I ring like a hollow tree. The kind in which whole generations of woodpeckers live and die. Roll me forward and I will crush anything in my path. It’s my size, not my intent. I never meant my body to be a war machine. Yet over and over I am pushed into battle, told my anatomy is the only hope of victory. At night I dream of a field wide enough to encompass my ringing emptiness. My galloping tree-trunk legs. I arch my wooden spine beneath the stars. But make no wishes. If I vessel well enough the bodies of others, perhaps a gate will open in the walls that keep me cantering around salvation. I drop the rope ladder now, right into your hands, and let you climb.
poem for everything which has never been languaged
I’ve been looking for new words in unlikely places. I read a table’s worth of waiting room magazines, scroll through thesauri on my phone. I'm an unfortunate sort of collector. Bottlecaps, grudges, rocks in my pockets that look more like rocks than any rock you’ve ever seen in your life. I’ve got it all. Now I’m looking for words. Intransient, haibun, pomelo. A medium through which I can eat the world and spit it out all my own. As if I matter. It makes me feel like I do. To read what I’ve written again, to have been a being who will be. That’s a trap I could fall into forever. With a smile on my face. Lupercalia, exegesis, anathema, okapi. My poetry bloats with vocabulary. I’m too sentimental to part with any word I’ve ever rolled across my tongue. All I see is abstraction, but oh, the colors, oh, the blinding light! I’m floating through it, this immaterial world which explains the other world. I’m forgetting to look outward. But like anything with a body, the other world comes breaking through. Makes possible and impossible the reality of my word collection. I slap my left cheek. To wake up my own body. Which still lives. In the evening I sit outside trying to write the dying light into something I can keep forever. But the sunset overtakes me. How satin
dusk lands soft and pink
on the dogwoods. how much more
do I need to say?
Esmé Kaplan-Kinsey (they/them) is a California transplant studying creative writing in Portland, Oregon. Their work appears or is forthcoming in publications such as Beaver Magazine, JMWW, and Gone Lawn. They are a prose reader for VERDANT, a mediocre guitarist, an awe-inspiring procrastinator, and a truly terrible swimmer. They can be found on X/Instagram: @esmepromise.