TRANSDIFFERENTIATION
why not talisman your body with cheap charms?
chew the unspeakable 桃子? sail off in search of ambrosia?
golden apples? a holy grail? you can’t count
on transmigration to pour your soul back into a human vessel / you can’t count on
your honda’s transmission to hold until you get home / if metempsychosis is
stolen immortality, you feel no remorse / do you really want to return
from cosmic comatose bliss to be a long-stem rose or some other symbol
of someone else’s love? ask sisyphus to trace the shape
of his callouses and tell you how happy he feels / you can wait for late to retronym
your proper name, bingeing bake off, knitting snood after snood, or you can find
the magical grackles / they’ll exchange your freudian regressions for
a child-sized skeleton / fresh lenses / firm skin... / up to you / you are now approaching
the point of radioactive decay / a half-life crisis / the instant of your transformation
into clever lead / if you’re clever enough, you can pestle yourself
a helichrysum-meets-cicada-skin cocktail / name it ‘transdifferentiation’ /
delirious, you’ll delete freckles! / sunspots! / buy crop
tops again! / if a jellyfish can do it so can you—
channel your inner turritopsis dohrnii & unsheathe your spine! /
just like sliding a toothpick from your favorite amuse-bouche /
convert to a glossy polyp / a blob / slippery / shimmery / reborn
on the seafloor / on the seafloor / surrender / you’ll love what you’ve become
ABOUT THE POET
Lizzy 柯 (Ke) Polishan’s poems appear in Gulf Coast, Passages North, EPOCH,
RHINO, Tupelo Quarterly, petrichor., Poet Lore, Rust + Moth, Greensboro Review,
Pacifica, and others. She is a guest editor at Palette, a poetry reader at Psaltery &
Lyre, and the managing editor at River & South Review. She is the author of
A Little Book of Blooms (2020). She lives in Pennsylvania with her husband.
ABOUT SUGAR HOUSE REVIEW
We loved reading the work that we’ve published (clearly), and we want an
opportunity to better hear our contributors. We're featuring audio recordings of
poems from our pages, read by the poet. This an open invitation to all contributors
from any of our issues, we were delighted to print your work, now we’re eager to
hear it.
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