“If I Was Other, and Anything Else” by Ronda Piszk Broatch

If I Was Other, and Anything Else

I want a gravestone made of vapor, to be the eighth-
pitched baseball, the hundred-mile-an-hour sneeze.

Let me taste your wrist with my feet, my three hearts
missing no beats as I squeeze through a quarter-sized O.

Pandemonium is another name for family, for the way
we organize into groups of mother-weary and sleep-deprived.

Praise the exoskeletal shelter, the bone house wasp nest!
This is just to say I have accepted the spent mouse, tasteful

arrangement of organs on the landing. In the garden
I’m the spiderlings’ nest; in the tent it’s anyone’s guess.

I want a rejection slip so sweet as to be convinced
you love me, hood-winked and noose-slipped

like an octopus from its aquarium prison, a butterfly
on the wingtip of the graveyard angel.

Ronda PISZK Broatch

Poet and photographer Ronda Piszk Broatch is the author of Lake of Fallen Constellations, (MoonPath Press, 2015). Broatch is the recipient of an Artist Trust GAP Grant, and her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart prize. Her journal publications include Blackbird, Diagram, Sycamore Review, Missouri Review, Palette Poetry, and Public Radio KUOW’s “All Things Considered,” among others.   

Headshot: Ronda Piszk Broatch

Photo Credit: Staff