by Hannah Copley
Support Into the Void by reading this piece in a beautiful print edition of Issue #17 that’ll look great on your bookshelf.
The listicle, Fifteen Disgusting Facts About Your Body,
includes an x-ray of a baby’s skull, complete
with milk teeth stacked up like jaunty tower blocks
inside the bone holes. Did You Know,
says number nine of the listicle, that women
are born with all the eggs they will ever own?
It’s exhilarating to know what I’m capable of
shrugging off, how every minute is an act of giving.
The other women in the clinic look like they’ve given
up their bones and muscles too.
We lay in our recliners like dead dolls. None of us
knows how to transcend tenderness yet
and when it’s time to go home, I look down
and see that I haven’t got my shoes on.
Hannah Copley
Contributor
Hannah Copley’s work has recently featured in POETRY, Under the Radar, Bath Magg, Strix, Stand, and Verse Matters. She won the 2019 Newcastle Poetry Prize for her poem “Juice” and the 2018 York Literature Festival Poetry Prize for her poem “Haworth, 1855.” Hannah works as a lecturer in creative writing at the University of Westminster and is a poetry editor of Stand. Her debut collection, Barely Contained, is forthcoming with Carcanet Press next year.
