Zoe Dzunko

IRL (Summer of Distance)

If only to know this

unknowable thing, like

can the body hope to

be anything more than

measurable edges,

fifteen colours, a name

and a date. It is not 

enough to find the soft

skin behind the kneecap,

caress it in moments

of tenderness; the lined

palm of mystery goes

on collecting its dumb

DNA memories from the

bodies it skims, urging

close, closer. I know you

like the bent water vision

of the legs that became,

so quickly, not my own;

I know you like the black

screen you dull to at night,

effacing a days worth

of experience. And

ever still, the longing

to know a body down

to its pixels, where they

form their squares from the soft

human curves of a cheek;

the warmth of an ear, lost

in twenty-three rose-hued

variations; limbal

ring blown out, into this

mess of eye.

Zoe Dzunko is the author of All of the Men I Have Never Loved (Dancing Girl Press), Bruise Factory (NAP) and Wet Areas (Maverick Duck Press). She is the Poetry & Short Prose Editor of The Lifted Brow, an Assistant Editor for Coconut Magazine and, with Sarah Jean Grimm, founded Powder Keg, an online poetry quarterly. Her work has recently appeared in Guernica, H_NGM_N, Bodega, The Fanzine, Two Serious Ladies et al. She’s online at: zoedzunko.tumblr.com