Anatomies
- Jun 27, 2025
- 2 min read
by Rowan Tate
The world may end with a poppy blooming between my toes. Its ripe red face splitting open from roots made from my skin. It knows. Mother, forgive me for I have pluck-pulled petals from their stems, swept dirt beneath the altar steps, let the bees drown in a glass of sugared tea. I walked without looking, past the face of a trembling bird, trampling moss that was still learning to breathe. I have turned my back on a calling voice, taken the bread from the chapel, thrown salt on ground someone needed to grow. I have painted over the mouth of a friend, wrapped blessings with a bitter tongue, shout-sung lullabies to keep myself from hearing truth. God, you know. The list goes on. Prayers tumor inside me like sick tissue — clotted, slow to heal, leeches to a world that keeps pulsing in its decay. I feel my threads snap through pores and cells, the slow bleed of life through my skin, the tremor of bones thrusting blindly in the dark. God feeds us truth shreds like torn flesh, waiting to see what we turn into. The aftertaste, air in the throat, where want ferments like old fruit. The graze of regret like a beetle’s broken wing, a cold head against my chest cavity. Mother, I listened. Mercy is the body’s final hunger: an exit soft enough for organs to hold their openings, a garden sprouting from all that curdled marrow and spilled blood.
Rowan Tate is a Romanian creative and curator of beauty. Her writing appears in the Stinging Fly, Josephine Quarterly, Meniscus Literary Journal, and Stanford University’s Mantis, among others. She reads nonfiction nature books, the backs of shampoo bottles, and sometimes minds.
