Jesse Rice-Evans: Symptoms

Photo: Joanna C. Valente

Kodiak

I try to tell the guy who picks me up at the pizza place that I just want pizza and to curl inside a stranger’s bed watching svu I find ways to let myself unfurl but you know me I move slow until I don’t just let me leave I’m getting a car I’m I’m

shocked by how you lie to me like I wasn’t just where you are
an untethered abundance trailing into a pile on the floor
of the library the one downtown with the brick walls on every level you know the one 

Somehow I begin to cry that drenched feeling behind my brows like
I am filling up and spilling a little 

Spring and winter are fighting over which season it is;
I’ve moved on from conflict 

Instead I grab you by the shoulder and we swim into tufts of pine
spinning unruly just outside of town the work I do just adds to the piles of unread sacks made of impermeable cloth that do not let me spill even a little 

I give up a lot for my meds, but I refuse to give up my hair:
I trim and sculpt around my ears, layers startling chemicals across my scalp,
ignoring the tangled ponytail still magenta clipped up at the base of my skull.

I take pleasure in annihilation.

Symptoms

1.       nausea

2.       muscle cramps

3.       fatigue

4.       dry eyes

5.       loss of libido

You have done bad but others have done worse.

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These poems originally appeared in our ebook The Queer Body.  

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Jesse Rice-Evans (she/her/hers) is a white neuroqueer femme and Southern poet based in NYC (unceded Lenape territory) studying femme rhetoric. Read her work in Hematopoiesis, Peach Mag, glittermob, and Nat. Brut, among others, and in her debut collection, The Uninhabitable (2019), from Sibling Rivalry Press. Find her at jessericeevans.com