Jan. 8, 2023
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STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND
By Raye Hendrix
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STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND
By Raye Hendrix
Self, the smell of rain on a cold wind,
passes through the body as it pleases,
expected but imprecise as weather,
a thunderhead on the horizon, then—
suddenly—here, observable only
when being observed.
::: The body is not the body, but
a window, cracked. The body—
this body? mine? —a sieve
for what the mind (this mind?
mine? am I am, self-owned,
possessable?) lets slip. :::
Today I am myself again. Must not
look too hard in mirrors, darkened
windows. If I observe the hands
that today are my hands tomorrow
they won’t be. The weather changes.
Who can say why.
Raye Hendrix
Raye Hendrix (she/they) is a writer and artist from Alabama. Raye is the author of the chapbooks Every Journal is a Plague Journal (Bottlecap Press) and Fire Sermons (Ghost City Press). She is the winner of the 2019 Keene Prize for Literature and Southern Indiana Review’s 2018 Patricia Aakhus Award. Their work has been or will soon be featured in Poetry Daily, American Poetry Review, 32 Poems, Shenandoah, Poet Lore, Cimarron Review, Poetry Northwest, Tupelo Quarterly, and others. Raye is the Poetry Editor of Press Pause Press and Co-Editor of DIS/CONNECT: A Disability Literature Column (Anomalous Press). Raye is a PhD candidate at the University of Oregon working in English and Disability Studies, and she serves as the Chair for her labor union’s Disability Access Caucus and Co-VP for Equity and Inclusion.
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Image Description: A white, femme-presenting nonbinary person with shoulder-length red-brown hair and hazel-green eyes is smiling at the camera and wearing rainbow earrings and a dark green and navy sweater.