The Self and Place

by Emily Lake Hansen

You say our place in the universe
is insignificant – we are just little specs,
a genetically random configuration of molecules,
two dots the size of sugar ants.

I huff, scrunch my face up in front
of the mirror. No, our dots,
I'm sure, are bigger, more brilliant than the rest.

In the meantime, we're concerned with place right here.

For a month we shared
a converted shipping container in Munich,
a single twin bed and a desk, space enough
only to slither around one another, our suitcases
and legs always touching, our selves always
bumping into the other.

We met on the Gulf Coast – just kids.
You said, let's get out of here, because
your family never did. I said, sure, because
mine always had.

So, after college, we headed for Phoenix,
rented half a house downtown, bought
a tiny flowering cactus for our windowsill,
and somehow killed it.

We moved because that's the thing you do
if you are young and dreaming, if you are selves
busy acting like selves in the universe.

But we are both better
at staying put, at settling down, climbing
into bed, lying on our bellies, fingertips
touching in sleep.

I believe, sometimes, that I am more important than the universe,
that I is bigger than place, but I have seen self shrink inside at the sight of desert,
puff up like a peacock when two buildings touch.

In Arizona, you climbed down into a canyon
and stopped breathing. For whole minutes,
you were unsure if you would start again,
if you would survive this new place.

Dismemberment

by Emily Lake Hansen

After they took her tail, she had to learn
about feet: how to wriggle
the leftover thread out of her toes,
how to scrub off the dead skin
with a file, how to balance her weight
between the two of them – there were two,
that had surprised her. She became
meticulous, waxing away the blonde hairs,
fine and invisible, painting her toenails
red – a color the bottle called Red at the Beach.
Later, she learned to dunk them into water,
to tie them back together with butterfly kicks,
to move her toes so that each one
felt the ocean. At the beach now,
she sits at the edge of the shore,
legs spread apart, bottom buried in sand,
and tries to remember if she had been happier
back when she was whole and light
underwater or if she prefers the new work
of walking, heavy, through the waves.