Zoa Coudret

Without boundaries

I am small, can I still contain multitudes?

When you fail, a friend told me once, you must 
clear your eye-dust, mullett your hair,
and cloak your glands with a sexy new outfit. 

Sometimes my guts shudder when I consider 
how I only love narcissists and know
they will never love me. Sometimes I retreat into myself,
fantasize that I am a mollusk, splatted bird-grub 
on an embankment next to the sea.

Imagine if ganglia 
were attached to antennae 
shooting out of our heads 
and our retinas could see 
as well as the mantis shrimp. 
Maybe then we could escape 
our Neolithic bodies, 
maybe then we could exist 
without boundaries.

Certain places


There are certain places I can’t be me:
the restaurant patio overlooking the bay,


the factory where my hands accumulate calluses 
& grease, the theme park where coasters extract screams.


I can’t wear dresses anywhere but the cement
cage that is my apartment, exposed drainpipes


& other industrial filigree accept me. Sometimes 
I put on lipstick & eyeshadow & walk 


the cobblestone street over cellar doors, 
drainage grates, other entrances to the underworld,


& dream of being light & shapeless as the clouds. 

Home


If a young enby falls
asleep in the forest, do they have 
a gender?

They rub their face 
across the mossy rocks
like a cat upon an armchair, 
how can you call them
boy or girl and not cascade 
of extrahuman combustion? 

They are nostalgic for somersaults
in fields full of buttery weeds,
elliptical swarms of starlings
over cattails, it’s called 
a murmuration but memory
renders it silent. 

Home was where their feet grew
into the floor like coral, reefed
in with their saw-toothed family, where
they opened their mouth and ate plankton 
just to survive, as satellites transmitted
different ways of being, translucent, 
primordial, they escaped only once
they writhed enough, gashed enough
at their maladaptive body
so that it became 
something true.

Zoa Coudret is a genderqueer fiction writer and poet. Their work has appeared in Peach Mag, New South, The Lumiere Review, The Hallowzine, and elsewhere. They are an MFA candidate in fiction at Northern Michigan University and work as an associate editor for Passages North. You can follow them on Twitter @ZoaCoudret and Instagram @zoaxvx.

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