Flow Cytometry
In this initial phase,
this simple injection,
trust is the way
your light scatters.
I probe your chest,
and can feel the firmness:
perhaps, the way you will
push me out.
Sometimes I wonder
if men are necrophilous,
if they want to reverse
the organic form of our moving bodies,
If they want to own me
as a static moment,
if that’s why I’ve walked through
so many graveyards with them.
Julia Rosenbaum teaches English at a public school in Boston and uses writing as a way to process the hours in between. She has workshopped her writing in the summer youth program at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and served as the co-editor of her college’s literary magazine, Red Weather, compiling voices and stories into little red books. She has also won the Frederick Reese Wagner Prize in English and the Thomas McNaughton Johnston Prize for her literature thesis.
Issue 12 • Next: Victoria Nordlund
The Mantle 