I am a body of many seasons.
Today, I am pliant, poured like honey
into the sun’s open jaw,
armpits sugared with sweat,
legs shaved raw and pink,
the wind kissing me greedy, relentless.
Tomorrow, I will be stiff.
The air will whisper cardigan, whisper retreat,
and I will listen. I will shrink into myself,
womb heavy with the secret ache of womanhood,
spine curving like a sickle moon.
Now a girl beside me at the museum
renders an ichthyosaurus, bone by bone,
a ghost inside the machine, vertebrae flickering into form.
I watch its body unearth itself from code and light
and think — how sure it must be,
to exist only in hindsight.
On the way back, She’s Always a Woman
spills through my headphones, and suddenly—autumn
burnt leaves curling through a cracked window,
though spring is still impossible, undecided
its face a different shape each morning;
one foot in the Triassic, one in the thawing future.
I walk past the upper campus brick houses,
their chimneys raised like fists against the wind,
and feel myself unstitching from time,
like the hem of a too-worn shawl,
so much the way my body is not the body it was yesterday,
my skin stretching, swelling—
woman today, something else tomorrow.
Maybe the season will settle before I do.
Maybe neither of us were meant to.
Indiana Plant is a freshman and Eccles Scholar at the University of Utah, where she is studying applied economics and anthropology. Her poetry has been published by The Palouse Review, Sink Hollow, Live Poets Society of New Jersey, Blue Marble Review (hi again!), and Scripto Literary Magazine. She has received an Honorable Mention in the Penguin Random House U.S. Creative Writing Awards.