(I’ve never met a woman who would disembowel
to make a moot point).

(I’ve never met a woman who would disembowel
to make a moot point).
RECENTLY PUBLISHED
wither your athletes/
dissolve your girls/
forget the toxic flesh
From its jaw, Héctor peels a sample of skin. Cuts baleen from its mouth. My body is in waves. The urge to turn from this great unspooling overtakes me.
Another dermatologist, his voice a baritone of confidence, a foghorn, a steady hand, said, “We will be sure to treat this very aggressively. Because it’s the worst thing that can happen to a pretty young woman, her hair falling out.”
I stared at him for a beat too long, my thin brown hair knotting like brows.
“Well, you know,” he grinned and a hand fluttered in front of his face, a butterfly of bashfulness. “One of the worst things.”
Of all of us, she was the most tied to the telescope. It had been her idea. All these men and their obsession with disk size. A thirty foot disk, a sixty foot disk, a hundred foot disk. Part of her genius was to imagine a different shape: the wide fragile net.
Where a tank farm once pressed its fuel ask: what do we hold to the ground and how do we take it back.