Just Ask Margaret Wolfe Hungerford by Christine Naprava
This?
This is not beauty.
And she?
She is not beautiful.
And he?
He is not beautiful either.
You’ve seemed to confuse beauty
with the trill way down low
in your gut,
and your gut
with the tangle of cables
tangling in your head,
and your brain
with whatever steers you,
organ or Above.
There are more organs now
than ever before,
as reported by the CDC:
organs sinking fast
in pools of viscous blood,
organs shimmering
in the face of your sun,
organs in Pantone Color of the Year,
2021 and 2020.
These organs are
strewn everywhere,
halved and whole
and quartered,
pinned to the graffitied
bathroom walls of bars,
idling on street corners
in cities near you,
packed onto the floor of the
New York Stock Exchange,
left behind in Lyfts and Ubers
as carelessly as the wallets
none of us need
now that our currency
is light as air,
now that our currency
is air.
It’s ten PM,
do you know where
your organs are?
That’ll be our lullaby,
the message blasted
from our phones
as we lose sleep,
lose hair,
lose teeth,
bang heads against walls,
break down walls
so that our heads
no longer have
anything to bang into.
The organs will be everywhere
come 2022.
Everyone will have an organ
by May of 2021,
as per the President.
The Above will go out of style.
The cables will inevitably knot,
asphyxiating what needs
to be asphyxiated
and asphyxiating what
we’re still working on
when the waiter’s hand
goes to grab our plate.
The trill that lives and dies
in every gut−
I regret to inform you that
once it’s gone, it’s really gone.
And the beauty I speak of−
it hasn’t been
in the eye of the beholder
since 1878,
the beauty hasn’t been
in the eye of the beholder,
the beauty hasn’t been
in the eye,
the beauty hasn’t been.
Christine Naprava (she/her) is a writer from South Jersey. Her work has appeared in Soundings East and Studio One. She tweets @CNaprava and Instagrams @cnaprava