Thrush Poetry Journal
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Rachel Mennies

Body According to Its Kind

Body where 
the wants lie 

in their want-
sized plots. Body 

where the rotten 
wants still grab 

what they will 
from the earth. 

Grabbing his belt, 
the body 

always says 
open. 

Body that bites 
the harvest 

to its core,
but doesn’t 

spit the seeds. 
Body of task: 

grow the berry, 
swallow 

the butter. Body
sweetening, heavy 

on the cord. 
Open body 

of instinct, his belt 
still new, uncreased. 

The body it came 
from could grow 

to any size 
at all. 

When the ripening 
fails, shake

the body. Tip 
it sideways

and see what 
plummets out. 

Body of 
caesura. Body 

of animal shit, 
of stake. 

Body growing 
in its own fat, 

shame-tippled, 
soft. Body 

of October fruit, 
hollowed 

by rot. Body 
still red 

and round, 
if he doesn’t 

know better. 
Body he wants

to rub 
to a mirror’s 

shine, see 
his reflection

on its gleaming 
dead heel.




Rachel Mennies is the author of The Glad Hand of God Points Backwards, winner of the 2013 Walt McDonald First-Book Prize in Poetry (Texas Tech University Press, 2014) and the chapbook No Silence in the Fields (Blue Hour Press, 2012). Recent poems of hers are forthcoming or have appeared in The Journal, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Handsome, Poet Lore, and elsewhere, and have been reprinted at Poetry Daily. She currently teaches in the First-Year Writing Program at Carnegie Mellon University and is a member of AGNI's editorial staff.




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