Shiny Happy People

after Grey’s Anatomy S6E22

You were you, you were steadfast in

the way you kept your feelings rippling

at the surface, how my eyebrows

How when you felt a feeling, I let you,
instead of clamoring back up, for a reason,
we become a thing together, if we both agree to it

Day one, you understood me, where my edge begins camouflaged well behind these $90 jeans, they arrived in

a sleek plastic box and I was charmed by the package I will admit it I am susceptible to marketing like any other human with blood and plasma, the extra meat of my body does not feel aside from more body means

more soft tissue to get wound up like a piano wire, more locations to nest into, springs of fascia I scrape across the porous oiled edge of my sternum

My bodyworker hefts her knuckles between my slipped ribs, kneads the joint between chest and cavern of pit just beneath, fists thumbs up and underneath some invisible thread of

If most of you stings underwater, hovers and floats, its belly, its heart brimming with how someone hit you before

Everything else is just bumps and bruises 

Immersive Empathy

It becomes another burden: that which is not revealed

   - Sara Ahmed

To make sense of it through writing,

the newness of establishing ourselves

free, trained, investigative

Demanding, knowing I'd have

to prove myself very much and

the more I interrogate the more

adventurous I become, the sickness

spreading in and out of great long

corridors the coats inhuman, building

a revelation, empathic and; Since we

broke up, I am wearing lipstick again;

I nourish, nourish 

Jesse Rice-Evans is a queer Southern writer based in Brooklyn. An enthusiastic Leo/Cancer/Aries, her work has appeared in tons of great journals, including Deaf Poets Society, Bad Pony, Moonchild, and Wussy. Reach her on Twitter & Instagram @riceevans