Rachelle-Anne Lawka

Borrowed Animatronic Meat-Suit

anything can be a Wölf if you’re not careful. a host of candles burning
at your father’s seance. two girls rising like stags on their un-legs

in your backyard. sometimes, the world stills between the gap of your
front teeth. this is a kind of magic. when you step backward over

the threshold of your childhood, curl into a cockle shell on your twin
bed of wet black mould and death cap, this is just another monday.

when you take off bloody, wash away the Wölf with irish spring
and a desire to return to september, this is just another body

reduced to a highway. you can try to learn how to dull your fangs,
but somewhere there’s an underground party where you fill

his mouth with holey, not holy, Wölf-teeth, and how easily these
small givings can turn to acts of taking if you forget to keep watch:

your indigo name on a stranger’s lips. a ghost sleeping above your
sweating brow, a fish, too ugly, thrown back into the ocean’s bloated-blue

belly. here, it is the bad side of the Wölf that gets you first. here, there
is no right word for temporary escape when what you really mean

is the long, scrubbed face of wanting, removed. now is your chance
to finally say something honest: blood is blue on skin under moonlight.

a Wölf’s bruise glows neon after dark. feeding the wild Wölf only
results in third-degree whirlpools. now is your chance to say something

dishonest: the borrowed animatronic meat-suit has loved you always.
the empathetic rancher cried tears of joy when his livestock was resurrected

the last time. the EMT poltergeist playing with the ouija board
in your backrooms sincerely missed you, and that’s why she brought you

back to life. none of this is magic. it is a failed medical response.
there are mornings when the lake near your house evaporates and you

pretend to be a fish drowning upward in air. sometimes, a kind hand
reaches in, pulls you back down. it never hesitates to throw you back in.

this has always been a mistake. sometimes, you open your mouth wide
enough to reveal two sets of Wölves breaking the surface of your skin.

RAchelle-anne lawka

(she/her) is an emerging Canadian poet living in Ontario. She is currently a candidate for the University of Guelph’s MFA in Creative Writing.