Jarred Thompson
Everything Touched
They will come with their needles and prod
me like a horse on a ranch.
They will make me strip,
hold my nutsack and feel
along every tube for signs of my grotesqueness.
Shining warm lights onto skin,
searching inside and out for what’s truly within.
This is the point where your body doesn’t belong to you.
Where science overrides all emotion.
Take pill, take pill, bend over like before
(you are well versed in submitting)
take it and keep quiet.
Hypodermic needles uncover the running poisoned river
which has drowned millions before me,
the numbness of too much possibility,
too much anxiety, too little solid ground.
Then take your condoms and be gone
Return to a world scattered and confused
Where every hue is changed into some gothic version
Of itself.
Even smiles, even tears, even laughs, everything touched.
Nothing saved from this that will find you out.
Jarred Thompson‘s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Typecast Literary Magazine, Type House Literary Magazine, Outcast Magazine, the Esthetic Apostle, Sky Island Journal, Cosmographia Books, Best New African Poets Anthology of 2016, and New Contrast Literary Journal. His chapbook Universes and Paradoxes was shortlisted for the Kingdom in the Wild Poetry Prize. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Typecast Literary Magazine, New Contrast Literary Journal (forthcoming 2018), The Rainy Day Literary Magazine, ImageOutWrite, the Johannesburg Review of Books and Transcending the Flame: The Writivism Mentoring Anthology (Black Letter Media, 2018).
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