I’ve imagined the body
confused.
Outside your apartment building,
feet on backwards, hands that don’t fit arms,
all wobble, no electromagnetic cable available,
antennae gummed and mental acuity
last seen leaping the fence.
There’s a peaceable backwards message.Like semaphore left lying on the warm Earth.
Busted open, signalling for assistance,
folded in before finishing the letter.
I stood up from a dizzying height.Looked into photo immersion,
pushed on the Panorama Stitching App.
Set a dial to stop the scramble entering my software.
Solutions found from the mouth of an AI executive,
rolled out options that scrolled into meanings;
set levels: everything from carotene limits
to hormone replacement.
Answers were pitched then from a search enginespread out into the ecosphere
as if there’d been a leak in a subterranean sump.
Found the effect (all lubricant) in my hippocampus,
felt giddy in a whole new direction
even after they replaced my relocator
inserting it into one of my lobes.
Identification out of line,
sorted until I decided to step forward.
A sensation of wings beating the air
Trying to prevent me walking into a wall
and thinking it was the ground.
S J Finn by Proprioception | Sandalwood Poetry Reed Diffuser Set
SJ Finn (she/her) writes fiction and poetry in Melbourne (Naarm), Australia. Her poems have appeared in The Griffith Review, Overland, Cordite, Rabbit, The Green Fuse, Dazzle, The Age newspaper and The Best Australian Poems. Her work has been short and longlisted in prizes such as the University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor’s Prize, the Peter Porter Prize, the Newcastle Poetry Prize and the Val Vallis Award. She can be found at www.sjfinn.com
