THE BODY HAS A MIND OF ITS OWN

THE BODY HAS A MIND OF ITS OWN
(OR ELSE/VOICE ACTIVATES THE TOUCH)

Brody Parrish Craig

On good days I’m a roadside bottle full of piss and Armageddon.
On Mondays I can only fidget with the garden I can never touch.
I keep my bills in spreadsheets kept pristine as chapels, flagrant
Light. I drink a 40 ounce of other’s mountain dew. The fizz goes flat

Again. I rip the leg hair off the earth when I get anxious.
I say I’m Sorry God & Mean that I’m accustomed
More to plastic trees. They don’t make men like they used to, now
It’s all background checks and birth certificates,

Smooth interstates and paper trails,
Keyless start and legal documents.
Caffeinated bottleneck of sun over the traffic.
A yellow-tinted window: sunrise
Jaw of cigarette-stained teeth.

Brace yourself for grinning mug
Of billboard on the exit sign.
Emoji offramp’s mirror image.
Mountain. Dew. & Facebook

Prayer Request: Pastoral mirrors
monologue that mirrors bird chirp
notice feed. A kitten meme for breakfast
& Assigned sex seat for dinner.

The corporeal meets the corporate:
two parties meeting, clanking like a toast.

We made a deal. Dissociation.
Coast to coast, the clank
Of ceiling glass to ceiling glass.

I don’t have Monday blues.
I have a pharmacy receipt.
An empty shopping cart along the wayside at the offramp.
A broken payphone at the Info Dump & police-patrolled
neighborhood park.

A coinless, hands-free century. Another car on cruise
Control. A good-as-new Land Rover

Without hands. No hands, no glitch.

No hands, no glitch. No cog, no wrench.
A buttoned mouth as buttonless machine.

Brody Parrish Craig (they/them) is the author of The Patient is an Unreliable Historian & Boyish, which won the 2019 Omnidawn Poetry Chapbook Contest. Their writing has been published in Muzzle Magazine, Poetry, Missouri Review, and TYPO, among others. They are the editor of TWANG, a regional anthology of trans and gender nonconforming creators from the South and Midwest.