wildscape. literary journal

My Body is a Forest Now
by Hannah Page

My nouveau riche ex
boyfriend took me to previews 
for a play that featured two people falling 
in love. They fucked 
in the first act but didn’t cry 
until the second. 

That’s how these things usually go: 
First comes love, then comes 
marriage, then comes 
inexorable longing 
for the kind of	freedom expressed 
in a creaseless forehead and a warm 
breeze winding through a fire 
escape late at night when the moon is 
a waxing gibbous: a shape nobody ever pays 
attention to – and I am brushing 
my hair in the moonlight, airing 
my tits between 
the curtains like a gallery 
opening. 

There are the stretch marks 
I used		  to imagine, reified in rivers 
branching off the skin –
Here are the hairs 
I do not want		      to acknowledge; here are 
the scars I dug 
into myself like excavating 
emeralds 
just below the surface. 

about the author // Hannah Page