Editor’s Choice: 2024 Philadelphia Stories Poetry Contest
and by this I don’t mean the eggs in me that grew
inside the fetus that was my mother inside her mother’s womb
I mean how when cats flick their talkative tails we sense
precisely the heft of our own, feel the spark and the stretch
of dormant muscles ready to twitch
&
I mean how we are blessed by remnants of
first-worm’s segmentation so yes our guts
have brains and yes our tongues are
smart and lissome as octopus tentacles and yes
our hands can reach from each side of
our bilateral bodies and in the middle
meet and clap and clap again
&
I mean how when I whisper you have wings you open
your chest, you pull your shoulders back, you feel your arms
retract and sprout anew through the exact
places in your back that ache whenever you
have given up hope.
Shhh now—a secret: your thyroid gland is in
your neck, for once you needed it to pull that precious
iodine from the water fluttering through your
gills. Now your fingers are flicking, aren’t they,
readying to reach, aching to touch those most familiar
flaps –
go on, no one’s looking, and your hand
knows just where on your neck to land.
Elliott batTzedek is a bookseller, poet, and liturgist who lives in Philadelphia. Her poems and translations have been published in: American Poetry Review, Massachusetts Review, Lilith, I-70 Review, Hunger Mountain Review, Humana Obscura,Sakura Review, Apiary, Cahoodaloodaling, Naugatuck River Review, Poemeleon, Poetica, Philadelphia Stories, and a Split This Rock poem of the week. Her chapbook the enkindled coal of my tongue was published in January, 2017 by Wicked Banshee Press. A chapbook of translations from Shez, A Necklace of White Pearls, is forthcoming from Moonstone Press in 2024.