my body feels like an inverted kiwi fruit: the meat
too slippery in the world and exposed, the hairs inside
prickly like a lung of tarantulas, this is not me, these
are not my teeth, and I’m all theirs to toy with, only
all mine to ruin, heard a man shout in an alley yesterday
and almost ran, my chest touched my pelvic floor before
I realized we were okay; he was just picking up a phone
call, just had a loud voice, some back alleys have sun-
light and retail, there are people who want the best for you,
who want to hold your Kafka’d body to the light and tell
you how smart you are, laugh at your poorly timed jokes
and not make one of you, they do not want to twist your
body into any new shapes, they do not want to steal it
out from under you, sometimes, a fruit is just a fruit, and
you’re made of too much sunlight to be looked at directly
Virginia Laurie is an undergraduate student at Washington and Lee University whose work has been published in LandLocked Magazine, Panoply, Tiny Seed Literary Journal, Short Vine Literary Journal, and The Merrimack Review.