Juice the Lasers
fiber optic lasers juiced to pinprick speed
leave a hair strand width gash
clean scalpel slice – a directive – perhaps
engaging car doors – hinges mind to body
working the metal with acetyl torch these
cutouts hold jaggedness to angled step
lightning bolts
i’m still a tad squirrely with all this socialization
but i’ve been zooming through the ethers since before
my physical birth so fissuring between here and there
is familiar in a fuzzy effervescent sci-fi way
i need a cut away feather to dislodge gravitational yokes
that oppose my shoulders rising up in volcanic tension
if still i had a womb there’d be an elephant in it
trumpeting endoscopy – mine was lased out
through my belly button because i just couldn’t bleed
any more for the millions sacrificed
over thousands of years
in the name of god.
Suzanne S. Rancourt, Abenaki/Huron, Quebecois, Scottish descent, is a USMC and Army Veteran. She is the author of the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas First Book Award, Billboard in the Clouds; murmurs at the gate, which won the 2023 Poetry of Modern Conflict Award winner; Old Stones, New Roads, a 2020 Autumn House finalist; and most recently, 2023’s Songs of Archilochus. She is a multimodal EXAT, a Writing the Land Project Fellow, and a Guest Artist at UMI’s New England Literature Program. She was the Keynote for the Maine Military and Community Network Annual Conference (2023, 2024).
