Kanika Lawton
I Used To Live in the Stomach of America
Upon viewing “Who Killed Liberty, Can You Hear That, It’s The Sound of Inevitability, The Sound Of Your Death,” by Daniel Joseph Martinez, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, October 2017.
I used to live in the stomach of America,
sour the way I combed my damp hair.
I don’t know what happened;
green with greed and envy and
all the vomit pooling at our feet.
Emetophobia can’t mask this stench,
and xenophobia won’t stop the swimming
at your shore.
Nothing feels more like disembowelment
than twisting intestines into bowstrings
for hair I cut off with a butcher’s knife.
People say you have a man’s face,
my grandmother says I look like a boy now.
I didn’t want anyone to find me so I clung
to your insides so fiercely I left ulcers. It’s
been almost a year and it still feels like our
lungs are on fire. When I crawled out my hands
were stained with blood. I don’t think you
can blame me for that—
I never broke your heart.
Kanika Lawton is the author of the poetry collections SANTO CALIFORNIA (2017), Every Song We Could Never Listen To (2017), and Wildfire Heart (The Poetry Annals, 2018). Her work has appeared in Ricepaper Magazine, Vagabond City Literary Journal, Hypertrophic Literary, and Shared Horizons: A Rambutan Literary Anthology, among others. Founder and editor-in-chief of L’Éphémère Review, Lawton is a 2013 Scholastic Art & Writing Awards Gold and Silver Key recipient and a 2018 Porkbelly Press Micro Chapbook Series finalist. She holds a BA from the University of British Columbia and lives in British Columbia.
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