D. Marriott Response

This piece had me in and out of allusions like no other. For sometime I was completely unable to make up my mind- was this piece about birth? death? is it a myth? someone's reality? or all of the them?

After the relentless back and fourth, I finally fully threw my heart into the theory that felt familiar in the most uncomfortable ways- the relationship, reflections, with self.  

The way the author begins (The thing sheds its skin in water) the piece reminds me of a moment with myself- a moment in the mirror, shedding the outsides of my gender, my naked self laughing at my reflection, not realizing the irony of it all (A girl admires her half-exposed breasts/Her spine wracked/Her knees bleeding on the path of snow). The third limb of myself yerning to tug both broken parts in their direction and embrace them (Let him embrace my unmade being). I understood that these parts of myself were right for feeling wrong (The wronged child not in words but in the desire), but I knew they were not aware of the war they had declared on their shared vessel (A girl throws herself in the river).

After the opening lines, the rest of the poem feels like a battle. There is blood, pain and death. The confrontation is with the narrator's own reflection.

Whatever our deformity,
here it is a lost child.

Because we parented the creature

despite the pain and discomfort the narrator feels with who they are, towards the end of  part I, the character begins to realize the destruction such a perspective will have on he himself. How will these parts of himself reconsile? Can they?
(Lovers come and go/But the true other is a muscle between forefinger and thumb)

Pain is sometimes easier-

In part II, the narrator seems to have lost hope of what could be and has settled into what is-

(here ruin is the sign /On a filthy mass of rags/breasts lie strapped to words/

I flail in the womb)

During the final stanza of the poem, we are confronted once again, with the author's ability to strike the fear of god within us with his clear imagery (to the enemy whose grin unfolds like dark butterfly wings in the wilderness).  These first lines give us a hint of the circular arch the narrator has been sketching around us, and before we know any better he has closed the gap right around us and left us in his darkness. Empathy does not do this pain justice- during the last stanza we are left with the thoughts the narrator is gappling with, we can smell [their] skin and his inside-out organs. But like the narrator we can not be put off, for the creature is my echo, and my future.

By the end we are desserted, alone, with ourselves and with only ourselves to blame. War declared on one's self is a battle not lost, not won, simply one that leaves a scarred surface [that] never heals.