Red Emma’s

Brody Wood splits their time between Maine and Arizona 80/20 writing poems and essays about dysphoria, disability, trauma, falling in love with all your best friends and people being rude. They are a performer, publisher, mentor and teacher, and they care about queer and trans antiassimilationist activism, radical support networks, youth autonomy, healing from chronic pain, listening to country music, going to math class and party planning.

(poem) STEEL

Rural Pennsylvania.

I still want you.

The way you come over me is in asthma.

I know enough about alarmist love to see your hands from here.

Where is the safest place you can think of?

Is it a problem?

I’m reading Rimbaud’s letters alone at Carnegie and it feels good in the way dreaming about your tongue in New England does.

Holding a steel heart for seven hours in a car, being calm, storm, taking care, taking this off, coming over me with your hands.

How much of what I want is jumping into a valley?

Rimbaud’s Verlaine:

“As soon as you are back, grab me right away.”

“For the time being, I embrace you.”

And then Verlaine show him in the wrist.

I want to be mean to you because I don’t want to be mean to you.

Allegheny county in arms.

In Maine while I was depositing money and you were reading a poem about what I want to do with your body, it was winter in the bank and you considered crying.

I was painless until I walked away and packed up the car. I was soap. I was my whole nervous system in the bath.

Is it a problem to sink in you alone without warning?

The safest place I can think of here is almost pestilence.

My arms lose their place on my body.