Aimee Lowenstern

A GROTESQUE PROPOSITION

Let’s all wear grey outfits and

climb on rooftops and

pretend we’re gargoyles.

I’ll buy day-old pastries for cheap and we’ll chew 

with our mouths open, we’ll stare at people

walking down the street. Let’s teach the pigeons

to be messengers again, name them things like Oil-Slick

and Calla Lily. They’ll send letters to lovers and congressmen

and shit on cops’ heads. Let’s teach ourselves

to blink in unison. Let’s pour rainwater

from our mouths. We’ll cry and make funny faces

and scare all the bad things away. Let’s grow wings

and not fly anywhere.

APHRODITE’S HANDS

Aphrodite’s skin has no color,

Aphrodite’s skin has no scent.

Aphrodite’s skin is the border

of the universe, or it might as well be,

they are pressed so close together.

That’s why the universe

is endlessly expanding, as skin does

while the body grows. That’s why the universe

is endlessly painful, as skin is

while the body dilates. Can you feel it?

—A silly question.

You can feel it.

Aphrodite has a billion billion fingers,

some large as tardigrades, some small as whales.

Every time a creature is born

she sprouts a new pinkie or thumb,

but they never disappear or shrivel up,

even as the thing that was born dies.

Fingersfingersfingers!

She tries to gnaw off the old ones

with her heart shaped teeth,

but fingersfingersfingers hold her jaw at bay.

Sometimes she gets a nibble in— Ouch!—

And bloody love splashes your head

on your way home from the grocery store.

Aphrodite has no eyes,

except for every eye.

When she wants to see,

she chooses a finger puppet—

You, for example—

and all your organs move aside

like the pins of a lock

as her finger replaces them,

so she can peer out of your eyes

and see something to love.

And she is all love, my poppet-moppet,

every joint of her— So for that moment,

you are all love, too;

your skull presses against it

like a false fingernail.

You are LOVE, you are LOVEYLOVELOVELOVE

to the brim, to the bursting—

You can only feel so much, the height of you,

the width of you, the seven trillion

nerves of you, but what you can feel within the love

are the knuckles, are the warm and living veins,

and they must be connected to something,

a hand, a heart, something unfathomably vast.

Something the size

of every lovelove that has ever been loved,

by anchovy and megafauna,

by every person with their eyes closed so tight

they can see a thumbprint swirling in the dark

Aimee Lowenstern (she/her) is a twenty-seven-year-old poet living in Nevada. She has cerebral palsy and a chihuahua. Her work can be found in several literary journals, including Fifth Wheel Press and Tower Magazine.