Lindsay Lusby

Machine as Well-Oiled Girl

                   / an autopsy /

beneath her ribs / a pulley

& ropes / tug the blue one
& watch the filament threads

            in the brightbulb of her head
                        spread light like tendrils

            of foxfire / pull the red
& her bloodpump will flood all

            the empty spaces / her mouth,
                        her lungs, the hollow place

between her splayed legs / a gutted girl

            becomes her own slab / stone as
a cellar, stiff as a door / do you

            still call her a pretty thing?
                        do you hold your breath

            & stick a garden-gloved hand
inside? / wake her with a spindle-prick 

            & she will stitch herself unsplit:
                        a time-lapse study in unripening.

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Lindsay Lusby’s debut poetry collection Catechesis: a postpastoral (2019) won the 2018 Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize from The University of Utah Press. She is also the author of two chapbooks, Blackbird Whitetail Redhand (Porkbelly Press, 2018) and Imago (dancing girl press, 2014), and the winner of the 2015 Fairy Tale Review Poetry Contest. Her poems have appeared most recently in New South, Gulf Coast, The Cincinnati Review, Passages North and Plume.