Lindsay Clark

To tap the core you should touch the crust

In college I almost
sold my eggs
sick with student loans
weak with long-distance
love, frantic to see
the boy I was sure
was slipping away
in the end dumping
the boy and joining
the army, another way
to sell the body
for an education
still I remember
taking the selfies
the company requested
a digital camera
a lamp-lit dorm room
long before the age
of perfected angles
and filters, I smiled
demurely, or tried to, 
then dumped it for a
scowl and scrolled through
my sap-orange options
I hoped the dull glow
did not suggest desperation
surely the client preferred
confident ova; coolly
they asked for a follow-up
I was already on a bus
to Fort Jackson
I wonder now about
the strained desperation
on the other end
the sort of yearning
that would foot the
nameless bills
of greedy little hearts
I studied biology
had a baby
concerned myself
with epigenetics
did it leave a print
all that want?
the longer I live
the more life takes
on that titian dusk
a filter called tarnish
no, I wouldn’t call it
quiet, any more than
the brown dwarf that festers
like a cinder
but crushes planets
to its amber breast
swallows the raw
material of kin
to miss it
you would have
to be senseless
I can think of
worse things
than a soft skull
melting like
mantle, crushed
through a
tunnel, vacuumed
like a yolk
toward a
tarnishing dawn
by a want
banished by
its own enormity
to the gray-orange
core of a dreaming
star

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Lindsay Clark lives in NYC with her family.