Human in Training

Liza Rose

because i experience earth in a body,  

i know that nettles and honeybees sting—  

learned it myself, despite those who came before me; i am alone in this body.  

touching my dark hair hanging down the length of my body, my friend says it looks like Bella’s in Poor Things.  

i too navigate the well-recorded, unfamiliar, turning world in a body  

that is ancient as earth yet newborn as a wet fawn. godly  

as water and black oil. mind and soul tied by spectral strings to pink flesh—they, i, we?—are so lonely in this vessel house world body.  

i am my own narrator, personal perspective not guaranteed not spotty, (this is my first time living) unreliable as a killdeer's wings— 

every day, i experience the world in a fresh body  

that will one day be ancestor, earth, deep dark and clay-cloddy. what i feel, i cannot pass on anything.  

here is my pain: you have only my words. i lie lonely in the earth’s body.  

i don’t know what i really want— i like having a body  

that tastes, touches, hears, smells, sees— but to be boundless as clear springs! yet i will experience the entire length of my life in just one body and the word is losing meaning and i am already so lonely in this body!