Josie Beatrice Brody

Pantoum with Eczema

In the end my skin is a wound begging to be scratched.
The dog hides dirt by his skin, fur licked clean and bright.
My mother told me to put a jacket on when she was cold.
Your voice deserving a raise, how we strike up defenses over nothing.

The dog says he’s clean, it’s the dirt that’s not.
I want to do an anatomy of all the rejections of my life.
With you I argue what doesn’t concern me, voice tired with raising.
I stand too fast and my head rushes on to somewhere beyond.

I want to do an anatomy of all the rejections of my life.
If only I could remove the tumor of things wrong with me.
My head rushes away and I can’t seem to match its hurry.
I think the dog is eating gravel, and my stomach is a driveway.

If only the things wrong with me were tumor-like and excisable.
Your kiss blows me open like a gale channelled into a balloon.
I’m jealous of the dog’s eating habits. My stomach is an unpaved dead end.
Freud thought that there was no untraumatic way to grow up.

When you kiss me I feel simplified like tupperware for keeping your breath.
When I get cold I offer to grab you a jacket from the car.
Freud turned out to be a plagiarist and a useless doctor.
To what end, my skin folding red origami paper open under my nails, feeling so good?

Josie Brody is a Comparative Literature Major at Stanford University who should have graduated in class of ‘21 but took a pandemic inspired leave of absence to get some teaching experience and intern for Baldi Agency. She is excited and scared to finish up her creative writing minor and impulse Slavic languages and literatures minor next year.