BY REBECCA MARTIN
Distinctly bright and dark: the craters
of my body I have called a surface.
Once I held girlhood like an animal’s skin
against me. Once I could be heard whistling
and hissing, a slow leak in my chest.
The weight there. Compression stacked
layers of ice and ocean like a club sandwich,
pressed flat against the buttons
of my shirt. The angry red marks
around my shoulders, in the softer
skin I don’t want to name.
On Ganymede, gender is an atmosphere:
my own magnetic field singing
and shrieking to an empty sky.
Rebecca Martin (she/they) is a queer poet from Dayton, Ohio. Their work has most recently appeared or will appear in Peach Mag, Muzzle Magazine, DATABLEED, Dream Pop Press and others, and received an Honorable Mention in the 2022 Gulf Coast Poetry Prize. They are a recent graduate of Oregon State University's MFA program, where they were awarded the Graduate Creative Writing Award in Poetry and served as poetry editor for literary magazine 45th Parallel and department steward for their graduate employee union. She currently teaches writing at the University of Pittsburgh.