Cloister

Our bodies are about other people. 

One line of music, illegible, 

encircles your hairy ankle. 

You suckle, not gentle, at my 

post-surgical nevermind—

and what that ache equals, I’ve 

racked the fucked archives to find.

Picnic blanket unscrolling sunlight 

on our excerpt of park. 

(Accuracy, surprise.) 

Soft smear of 

mayonnaise, cold cuts bit into, crumbs on a napkin, names. 

You showed me, each hand plays 

more than one voice. 

Now you say 

hands and I see yours: 

only, in particular,

our hurts the same height, 

similar in what they cast outside.

What pattern, then, could you live 

in forever? 

What unspoken order, 

what just-upon-waking-up dream 

of transparency?

(Frosted mylar, damp sheet.) 

All your hunger 

thrown down like a test— 

ink it in me. 

The tapestry’s caption reads 

The Unicorn at Rest, but he’s 

bleeding. Look, his white neck 

the repetitive flowers against. 

Pain’s its own kind of weather: 

meaningless

depth in a world made for flatness, deadpan as clouds on canvas—yet 

across you reached and 

pushed away my crutch. Here you are,  

said your eyes. 

(Says art.) 

I was literally touched.

---

On Devotion 

Hello again, my sickness. 

I can feel you breathing 

in the cracks between my bones 

like light almost, 

ripping the scrim of my proprioception 

stitch by anxious stitch — 

what will you whisper into my 

crevices this time? What ludicrous promise 

must the drug make, peeling open every petaled cell 

with its rain-fingers if 

nevertheless 

you thirst? You are the only one on earth 

who wants me completely, 

whose tinfoil swaddles each  

leftover gesture I lift to read its expiration date. 

You are the one awake 

and throbbing like the nacreous 

gasoline bleeding its colors into a puddle once the taxicabs 

disperse. 

When the end gusts across us 

and opens our surface so wide the sky completely 

penetrates and fills us with blank blue, 

I will still hold you 

as the father holds the blade 

against his son’s throat, prays 

for intercession 

and the stars shine down hard 

on all the toxic bloomstruck fields of 

earth, this consequence. 

I know no one escapes.

---

Crip Album  

I.

Fourteen-year-old girl in power

wheelchair: arm 

rests under arms, with head rest

cradling head, with neck cocked

backwards, white, a shot swan’s

spine and candlestick legs and

the useless immaculate shoes

(pink Skechers) as the lips

dispatch a rivulet of spit 

down the chin. She’s sick 

of sitting in her own wet. Stuck in

her head, a song by Taylor Swift.

II.Muscular American 

veteran, civilian 

polo shirt, old IED 

glow in his eyes, plastic 

basket in his lap in aisle three

— frozen dinners, novelties —

space beneath 

each knee 

III.

Scoliotic uncle: 

kitchen radio speechifying

brimstone as a crumb

drops , bending

IV.

Octogenarian in a lace

skeleton, her blue capillaries

are 

ivy’s conquest of a wall

crumbling from inside. Her eyes 

say anyone can have this 

latticed bone scantling to 

ponder but the plot 

thereunder, never 

V.

Was I disabled then? Was I ever 

disabled later — all shaky achy hunched over 

the shaft of the bronze-painted cane with its rubberized foot

collecting sand in the grooves of — for after, for when 

none of my legs on that beach would stand 

VI.

Juxtaposition isn’t 

equivalence until 

we are objects

VII.

Brown boy 

wiry, rising 

from a river. His unsplit 

chest gleams wet, 

his shield. Every 

body’s deaf 

in pictures 

VIII.

still life 

with ten 

pill bottles 

vial & 

needle

IX.

Nonplussed teenager 

trims bangs of demented 

former prize fighter, 

shut-eyed under 

scissors, who delivers 

urgent updates on a bout 

from 1973. When he 

recognized 

the pole, its slowly 

twirling stripes the color of 

America, what joy  

X.

Please complete the form. 

Check one: 

- sovereign individual 

- preexisting condition 

XI.

The cheerful-seeming 

woman in black leather jacket 

with two-hundred-thirty-eight-pound

legs, engorged fungus colossus 

infected / cut off / sprouting / sprouting — how

you look to her 

(not pictured) 

XII.

Not pictured: 

invasive species 

burgeons in thoracic 

swamp. All night 

a fine chemical rain 

falls in the dark of this body

XIII.

Staircase in my house I can’t

what “story” once meant

neutrally no help no entry

needing proof no clamber drunk

up to the roof on someone else’s

voice pain- less epiphany healed cut sealed shut skylight

no other

country 

XIV.

Look, it’s the mute 

boy again. Thin, clean, 

impish in between 

ice cream and seizure — 

the blur is his twitch. 

See the scar on his fist? 

Cut the big mirror 

open, reflectionless. 

The blood from his vein 

is the rain’s conversation 

promising, promising 

him the garden’s 

soft and wordless dirt, 

for all you know 

XV.

Hey kid, what if you spoke? 

XVI.

Self-portrait: 

two-months-premature 

four-pound newborn 

girl is perfect. Nothing 

wrong with her.

Infusion Suite Pastoral 

I have my fears and I have let them go 

painstakingly as summer its last leaf — 

that one to the left, chrome yellow 

flecked with umber, drifting towards a patch of stale toast-grass that wants 

to be done now. Watch it land with me, 

casually — look how the invisible 

breeze that must’ve been lifting it up 

just enough after each rush earthward, stops. 

As if to drop were effortless! For years 

I’ve been trying to peel the slick clear 

plastic backing of prognosis off the stubbornly

resilient adhesive of old hopes. But we were

 manufactured together — one future 

and one boxed-in body inextricable as nature

is from the ghost of my face on this

extra-clean vitrine. The glare makes its

assertion: 

you can get only so close to the earth, 

no closer, can carry yourself like a glass of water

full to the brim up a red-rock escarpment to

where the dirt waits to be slaked — and discover 

nothing you touch it with heals. This

distance breeds in me a cruelty, a steady 

induration, all the layered pains and hatreds 

stiffening like icebox cake, that makes 

even the lushest cusswords curdle on my tongue. I’m

young! And not that sick — I can persist for years 

like this. The suite has all one needs to stay 

docile as the air in an empty cage, 

still as the the Past seems to stand in its

armature of dates and facts. But nerve-endings

remember touching you like it might give me

our life back, 

like — if only I could get down on my knees in the grass,

feel the gravel of centuries pressed to my bones and no

pain at all, no pain at all — I’d melt into the mutual world

again, with its food court smoothie stands, brutalist county

jails, harvest festivals

7 

celebrating bees, with the smell of wet

traintracks crossing a dawn, irreproduceable — 

and on the bench someone actually

laughing at a second’s person’s joke.  

That’s my last fear: not to be there.

Already I feel myself leaking attention 

in rivulets I can’t trace back to some source of

meaning. Already the station clock’s stopped glowing

for me like a place we would get to eventually, 

and the spry, healthy denizens of the vending

machine are my enemies. I so want to resemble them

it’s beyond forgiveness — fractureless 

as I pretend they are in their skins, their beliefs… 

is that what the pastoral is? Lust 

to read yourself into a landscape you’re not sure

exists anymore? To pump the old colors back

into it like spring, repapering the trees until

even this year’s damage seems 

natural — to rip out the needle and stand 

cold on the lawn in a paper gown as the stars

burn exactly where our folktales told them to, 

shining with all the indifference of proof 

on the questions they close, then reopen?

Thank

you, to whom I have never 

been a cripple. Amn’t. 

Your claws sinking into my hips before we are soft with each 

other again. Is it insane 

to want to be your piano — 

to have, just then, no other ambition, to

fill up with sound and then empty out and feel — not loss, but expansion?

Our coming was sloppily done and the

air laughed, each sun fragment

of it glistening. Ten o’clock 

Saturday morning, no meaning lined up just right with the ragged coastline of that look:

the black rock and century soft sand

of 

you shone into me. I’m not 

embarrassed. When we walk 

— you walk next to me in my 

green wheelchair — there’s

precision in the steps you do not take.

---

References

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About the Author

Michael M. Weinstein is a poet and scholar who writes at the intersection of trans gender, disability, and the history of visual media. His debut poetry collection, Saint Consequence, is forthcoming from Alice James Books, and his poems and essays have appeared in venues including The New Yorker, Boston Review, The Kenyon Review, Conjunctions, and The Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly Journal. He holds an M.F.A. from the University of Michigan and a Ph.D. from Harvard and currently teaches at Earlham College in Indiana.