GOLD
Billie is the first to sprout breasts in our bunk, her body so coveted amongst our puny group that when she admits to picking her nose, no one says a word about it, besides J.L., who laughs and replies, “Yeah, everybody does.” I’m flat as a knife, but I pick my nose too. It’s not all proper and smooth like Billie, who has the technique down, twisting her pointer finger around her nostrils like a drill and dragging out lines of snot the color of grilled corn. I didn’t know girls could get away with such things, but Billie digs for gold like it’s supposed to be sexy.
When I pick my nose one scorching afternoon by the lake, J.L. catches me and hisses, “that’s disgusting” and I look, like she’s looking, to my finger covered in crust and blood. Billie strides over in her triangular bikini and peers at the damage. “I’ve seen better,” she says, which is not the worst thing she could say. She sashays closer, breasts knocking like a Newton’s cradle, and I squint at her, a mobile sun. When she lays down, her newly expanded hips, round as risen bread, are swollen next to my unleavened ones.
“How do you do it?” I ask. Billie doesn’t say, “Do what?” She doesn’t say anything. We just fry our cells until they scream and I pretend I am being worshipped too, forgetting the maturing voice in my head, who’s been daring me to break my own heart.
E.J. SCHWARTZ‘s writing has appeared in The New York Times, Barrelhouse, Necessary Fiction, and elsewhere. A New Jersey native, she now teaches and studies fiction at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. She tweets @byEJSchwartz.
Read more by E.J. Schwartz:
Prose in Barrelhouse
Prose in Ghost Parachute
Prose in The New York Times
the story / the two white women will not retract, despite the fact /
that inside each story we tell another writes itself
When the dogs had finished their business, they were, for quite some time afterward, unable to disentangle, and the Abbot asked us not to disturb them. After he had anointed them with holy water, they slid apart and scurried out of the temple. I followed them out into the street.
the intoxicating ministry of dusk, the anchor of daylight lifting, sheets white / like a freshly crushed pill, // the vortex of the body and the clap of the / coral tongue...
Before we go any further, I want to publicly acknowledge //
that I love every person in this room. I mean it. /
We’ve traveled from all over to be here, and I love /
each of you, all of you, every last one of you, except /
Harold
How horrible does someone’s relationship with their mother, their childhood, have to be that its description is so much more harrowing than the account of that same person’s serial murders?
In the evenings Karcsi sat quietly at the table and watched his mother pray. Her lips moved silently through the rosary, and he looked as if he were trying to figure out which part of the prayer she was saying.
I tithe 10% of my new underwear to my future /
self, the one who has fallen in love.
Along one river fell /
all the luck in the world.
Starting this year, B O D Y will be producing three triannual issues per year: a Winter...
Prose Poetry and the City, Donna Stonecipher's probing, flâneur-like meander through the history and poetics of the prose poem, is written not unlike the prose poem itself—an open space of relations that view modernity and its poetics not as a matrix, a network, or a panopticon, but rather as a series of moving tensions.
