ON IDLE

A strangeness touches my neck, and I am tasked with moving it.  

I grow my hands from medium to large and then large to nothing. 

What does it mean when dust is only half inside us? 

What can it mean to make a soft ruin of a stamina? 

Lately, I have been feeling otherwise frequent.  

My list of to dos getting close to a kind of life.  

I visit the town’s library with a piece of mail to prove I am planar. 

That is, I am no longer delicious and sleeping.  

Underneath the August warmth exists a kind of world order. 

I float my palms open like a lotus and am born in an ear. 

I lift my exoskeleton and think: enough.  

I have been growing a practice of continuing genuflection.  

In linen pants I buy off Amazon, I study pink clapboards and outsized palms.  

I watch the trees’ nested shadows, how they split the sun.  

On Whitehead, a home framed in sea-green balloons, fluorescent pink flamingos.  

On Duval, a sickly man who sells cigars on the sidewalk and a sky that comes at me in sections.  

It feels good to imagine a room and that room being painted in yellow.  

It feels good to be reduced to a body.

—

from Issue 3 of Little Mirror Mag

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Stevie Belchak is a poet, writer, and editor of blush lit. The author of State of My Undress (o-blek editions) and Holy Holy Holy (Metatron DigiPub), she was named a finalist for The International Metatron Prize (2024, 2022), Four Way Books’ Levis Prize (2023), and Fonograf Edition’s Inaugural Essay Contest (2023).  Her work can be found in Antiphony, SARKA, Fence Streaming, The Denver Quarterly, Third Coast, Hobart Pulp––among others.