Ekphrastic I

art by the author

by Cait McCann

Speech is a powerful lord, who with the finest and most invisible body achieves the most divine works: it can stop fear and banish grief and create joy and nurture pity.

-Gorgias, Encomium of Helen

Ekphrastic I

Where do I get off, comparing myself to her like that? My forehead is tied to my toes. When I make my body concave it is only an attempt to ease tension between two. I’ll justify myself to you, even though you never knew I could exist like this. Nobody ever knew— to begin with. Later they say, I didn’t expect so much blue from you, whatever that means. Let me languish in length while I’m allowed. Can I say it hurts to be held? Room: what spacey center sound, what hollow-mouthed vowel. Rapture; muckraked mouth. I. I feel. I feel like a. I feel like a fragile thing: sing, sing— sung. I haven’t much to me. Stunted fingers, stubbed ankles and a frame too slick. To stake: a claim. A girl’s gotta be slippery like that— all oiled from iris to ass crack. A state of collapse into all of the things I don’t look like seems inevitable. I know what I am, I don’t struggle with that. Collapse, Calliope— conspicuous. Spelt it wrong, looked it up; didn’t mean what it ought. Somehow, I was still right— still caught myself out. The ancients confuse me on account of my needing to know all, always, post-haste to pomegranate pastures and evil Eve womanhood or limbal literary allusion inserted here. I won’t say biblical, I promise. I take this all seriously, later; still—now, even! The distillation of secondary sex characteristics; my annexation. It’s always serious! That’s why people think they can say things off copy when they actually shouldn’t— can’t; semantic. It’s why I’ve hated everyone at least once. You too, you novice. Especially you: you make me feel like a manufactured thing, actually faking it to be honest. Actually is an oddity. It actually doesn’t mean much in terms of the factual; nobody could actually protect me from the things they say, anyway. I’m always a fraud without trying. I hear yelling: the symphonic cacophony of not being a taut thing; a tight-bodied, looked-at, vying thing! I hate when I meet people. I hate when I meet people and I am reminded I am looked at. Maybe I don’t hate you, on account of my initiating this contact. Do I hate when people assume I am stupid because of my wounded ego or because of my wounded womanhood? Really!: I am neither an ego nor a woman, actually. I forgot about the beauty. In another life my mind: lauded, laureled; no fallacy. In another life people didn’t, don’t, hate me for ______. Mutilation in thought but have never sought gore. I feel like a sturdy cloth with an ugly pattern. Always, it is enough for other people to hate me, too— depending. Some decades it is trendy; I soak blood regardless of print or pressing. But that’s all a taut-string digression— a high thread count body cloth concaving while spaces open:

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