Parallax
Black hole at the heart
of Sagittarius: not fish
enough to be Capricorn,
not land-locked enough
to hunt. My paradox
is to be ever at the cusp,
never one / never other,
grasping threads of each.
You called me boy,
and I smiled to know
my chimerical self
was untouchable;
you called me girl,
and I marveled at how
it is to move between
worlds, ever guessing
what you will say next.
===============================
Sargasso Sea
1.
Scylla
July 2001 – September 2005
It’s always tough. My first
two lovers, a man and then
a woman, noticed. No room
on penetration, no harbor
from storm. Grin and bear it
is what I learned: to bleed
every time. Fresh wound
unrelenting, but pain
I devour. Riddle thrust
in me. Hard rain.
2.
Charybdis
November 2005
My third lover
arrives. You look
a little different down
there, he says. Imagine
me falling, imagine me near
the whirlpool’s edge. Inside, too,
I answer. Inside, monstrous. Can
you hear it? Siren-song
follows. I cave in.
3.
Shipwreck
December 2012
Enough discomfort
is enough. I choose to
go under the knife. Skin
in excess, shorn down; canal
below the accepted limit
observed. You might
want to look into it.
4.
Salvage
November 2014
Back under. All spoils
but wayward gonads
plundered. Cervix
untethered, that
ungainly hatch.
Cyst-filled tubes
clipped to the quick.
Uterus specimen smaller
than expected. You’d
never have borne it.
5.
Spoils
December 2015 – July 2016
Mutation. Prow, too,
disproportionate risk.
Undertow, lead
me through ether
a third-charmed
time. Whisper,
He’d never
have stayed
to tread in
your wake.
Prescient hindsight
unwinds. Buoyant,
I swim free of it.
“Parallax” first appeared in Issue 7 of Stone Telling. “Sargasso Sea” first appeared in Volume 1, Issue 1 of Remixt.
A.J. Odasso is the author of two poetry collections from Flipped Eye Publishing: Lost Books (2010), which was a finalist for the 2010 London New Poetry Award and for the 2011 People’s Book Prize; and The Dishonesty of Dreams (2014), which had the honor of launching at the Grolier Poetry Book Store and Porter Square Books. A.J.’s third collection, an expanded version of their BU MFA thesis, was shortlisted for the 2017 Sexton Prize under the title Things Being What They Are and will be published in Summer 2019 under a new title, The Sting of It, by Tolsun Books. A.J. continues to serve as Senior Poetry Editor at Strange Horizons, where they have been part of the editorial staff since 2012. A.J.’s recent prose publications include a short story, “We Come Back Different” (in the Winter 2018 & Spring 2018 issues of Pulp Literature) and a personal essay, “Being the Dictionary” (in Knowing Why: Adult-Diagnosed Autistic People on Life and Autism, an anthology from the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network launched this October).