Precipice by RL Wheeler

call it genesis: the way the body learns

rebirth from the edge of its want.

in a memory not mine, a mother

runs her hands through a son’s hair.

i do not know how to un-daughter

the image caged

within others’ stubborn memories

of me, or how to un-wound my own

without emptying

further from myself.

say i have a right

to my ghosts & masculinity

doesn’t mean to hunt them

down. aloud, i remember

my name & listen to its sound

collapse in midair: spine snapped

in half: small bird escaping

that cavernous nothing

inside me, where something thrashing,

which is not quite boyhood

but could be near it, grows.

there is too much i cannot give.

*

at the edge of the empty basin

where a lake could have been        

i consider the water held     

in my drinking glass

as if pouring it all could make

the body whole again

—the lake’s & my own.

---

RL WHEELER is a writer who works at the rupture points of genre and discipline. Their work appears or is forthcoming in Waxwing, The Journal, Southern Humanities Review, wildness, Foglifter Journal, and Gigantic Sequins, among others. A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, finalist for Tinderbox Poetry Journal’s Brett Elizabeth Jenkins and Majda Gama Editors’ Prizes, and recipient of the Howard Nemerov Writing Scholarship, RL is an editorial assistant and poetry reader for Split Lip Magazine and currently lives, works, and studies on Narragansett land (so-called Providence, RI).

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