An Interview With An Anxious Poet

What will they find when they cut you open?

Perhaps bird bones. Perhaps feathers and baby teeth.
Perhaps the thing that thrums beneath my skin.
Maybe no more than meat
to bloody their hands in.

How does it feel to have the terror take over?

Okay, it’s like this: Imagine that you are covered in bees.
Now imagine that you can’t move. Now, that someone is calling your name
through six feet of water.

Imagine that you are watching a stranger move
in the bathroom mirror, and you are wondering how
to get inside her bloodstream, and you are less girl

than you are a mouthful of gravel, loose threads,
scissors with the safety off, and you keep arranging yourself into a gun
that backfires at random.

Imagine that your hands are just an idea
of shaking that you don’t feel-
a remote jackhammer tremble, a 2.5 magnitude stutter.

Imagine that, aside from the terror,
the terrible part is that this
is the most real you have ever felt.

What does it mean to live inside your body?

It means that most days, I am still convincing my skin that it belongs to me.
Most days, when I am trying not to slip into the spaces between my own ribs,

I seem no more than my hornet head
and humming veins, but please-

see my face crowned in stars, please,
see my body wreathed in light.
Let me be more than my shaking hands.

How do you quiet the buzzing?

By repeating these words in the dark:

I am less girl than ink-stained bird bones,
but the wind cannot kill me

By Aislinn Rose

Biography:

Aislinn is a twenty year old writer from the little city of Adelaide, Australia. She is studying Journalism at the University of Adelaide and works for a local non-profit community radio station. She writes and performs poetry in her free time and has been published by the university literary magazine. When she’s not studying, working, or writing, Aislinn can usually be found reading a book in some hidden-away nook of the library.