She writes her life down in fragments. How it does and doesn’t appear.
The door most of all. A fear of simple locks.
She opens packages with knives because they are sharp and easy, unlike her fingernails that rip like paper.
She cannot fix the memory. The image will leave her one day, even if it is the last thing she remembers.
One way she thinks about her body is in assemblages. Everything touching. Her electron field in another electron field.
She refuses to tell a story because when she says it aloud, the assemblage tries to take it back, reabsorb the fragments.
Outside, the grass stalks bend, sway back and forth without breaking.
She fastens blades of grass into whistles, then hold the blade between her thumbs. She is terrible at making a sound.
At voice lessons, the teacher commands her to open up a little more, relax her jaw. She never stops repeating this.
She remains silent, even if she is singing.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 27, Issue 4.
Alyse Bensel is the author of Spoil (SFASU Press, 2024) and Rare Wondrous Things: A Poetic Biography of Maria Sibylla Merian (Green Writers Press, 2020) as well as three chapbooks, including Lies to Tell the Body (Seven Kitchens Press, 2018). Her poems and essays have appeared in Cream City Review, Pleiades, South Dakota Review, and West Branch. Originally born and raised in south-central Pennsylvania, she now lives in the North Carolina mountains, where she is an associate professor of English at Brevard College and director of the Looking Glass Rock Writers’ Conference.
See all items about Alyse Bensel
