I look disgusting. This moonlit skin

threatens to swallow my soul. The gnostics

knew a truth; perhaps not the truth. Fragments,

maybe. Fall to your knees, cry to a deaf God

‍

who has no ears to hear —

for ears are fleshy things.

And there are days when my body

is so fallen that it feels as though the possession

‍

of a body caused my fall;

like a stumbling child learning to walk;

I shall try to love this body. I will not balk

‍

at this hellish incarnation. I will call

on the name of the Lord, and learn to love.

I will learn to love. I will learn to love this body.

‍

Nichola Kowald is an Australian writer, a 25-year-old teenage girl by the means of HRT, a Catholic sojourner who lacks a communal body because that body does not recognise her womanhood. Displaced, she writes her corpus in verse and prose, in the raiment of feminine textile, hoping to spin the Fates’ distaff upon the acerose pen of spindle—to write of that bodily weave.

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