Forget Tattoos
L. Acadia
White people around here are all missionaries
my godless love warns / advises
666 is good luck, while
no one will get pagan pro-science atheist t-shirt messaging
of pentagrams, Darwin fish, Flying Spaghetti Monsters:
a tattoo could dispel Evangelical expectations.
I’ve pictured it for decades
waiting for vegan inks, a permanent job
citing low platelets and other pretexts.
chalk horse of Oxfordshire
flourishing on communal care two millennia before Christ
jumping an oxer over my hip
Mesopotamian Lilith
naked, winged, claw feet caressing lions
guarding my ribcage
primordial crinoid
feathery pinnules propelling it across the Pacific
floating above my shoulder (angel or demon)
Ginkgo biloba leaves
splayed like hands
groping my thigh.
My tattooed love advises / warns
colors run
tints fade
hues are disloyal
fine lines disappear
weight redistribution distorts
new aesthetics clash with old ink
no swimming for weeks
gotta be religious with sunscreen
but no one’ll mistake you for a missionary.
I already see my body
fading
faltering where it used to be steady
softening
atrophying
missed jokes
slower strokes
tightness and cynicism appearing like ill omen birds in the morning.
Even keeping a professionally-inked sensible thick line abstract design
out of sea and sun, I’ll age.
I’ll fade across Cartesian dualisms.
No tattoo anticipates staircase wit and
only luck would chance abductive inference across images.
No one has enough skin to tattoo every
inside joke and new relationship memory
theoretical argument, citation style, password, and
word that will smirk at the tip of my tongue.
Neighbors will never understand me.
How will I remember why?
L. Acadia has writing published or forthcoming in Kenyon Review, New Orleans Review, Strange Horizons, trampset, and elsewhere. An assistant professor of literary studies at National Taiwan University, L. lives with a human and hound in the 'literature mountain' district of Taipei. Connect at acadiaink.com or IG and bluesy: @acadialogue
