by Kayleigh Cline
This tupperware remembers my neighbour better than I do: breathes memories of her minestrone into each bite of shortbread — BPA quietly rearranging my cells. BPA quietly rearranging my cells as I rub gas station receipts between thumb and index finger, choosing to ignore the thousand molecular nicks. The thousand molecular nicks repaired by enzymes, as skin summons scars for connection — to link edges, to approximate a wholeness, lost. A wholeness, lost within the womb. Like my fingerprints, I arrived by erosion: a making by taking. Who was I before I wasn’t? Who was I before I wasn’t hurtling through this age of empty funerals? Chained links do not share anything except the inability to pull away from each other. The inability to pull away from each other is killing us. As a child, I slept cheek-to-cheek with my PVC doll, not knowing her skin spoke to mine in the language of free radicals. In the language of free radicals, what’s mine is yours. Never fear, for my shampoo is anti-pollution: it strips all smog from my scalp. It strips all smog from my scalp, then gifts it to the drain, to the river, to the mallard feathers, already green-glowing — so what’s a little more radiation?
Kayleigh Cline (she/her) has been most recently published in FreeFall, untethered, and Prairie Fire. Her work has also appeared on a bus and on a beer. In 2022, her poem “American Robin” won the Alberta Magazine Award for Poetry. She is an active member of the Stroll of Poets Society, Parkland Poets Society, and the Canty Collective of Writerly Women.
Capital City Press Anthology 