OLD WOOD PANELING AND AMERICAN BEER / CINDY M EMCH

The sharp smell of blood when the carcass comes home. It’s two hours past curfew. Open flesh strapped to the hood of an American car. Never on a foreign car–something about blood and steel that can only come from Detroit. The violence is carved into our skins.

 She sees you. She is unmoving. Sharp adrenaline is in the air. The woods smell hard. The moment turns. Flame catches. Releases her blood. She is too young. She is too female. You mount her. On the wall. Rules shatter like bones.

 Their trophies litter your house. Cleaned of flesh and bone and love and sweat. Bleached and sterile. Hips and antlers. Bones of conquests. Of a moment. Of destroying something you weren’t ever meant to have. 

Once I laid naked at 3 AM on the roof of my parent’s house. That night with stars and branches and moon owning the sky–I jerked off for the first time with roof shingles scratching into my back and at sixteen with blood on my shoulders, I am my trophy bones. These hips are owned. Anchored on my wall.

Emchy is the affectionate nickname of accordion player, poet and all over hellraiser Cindy M. Emch. She originally hails from the rust belt of Michigan and currently resides in the salty train laden port of Oakland. Cindy’s writings have been been published in the Can I Sit With You project, LodeStar Quarterly, There Journal, So You: 35 Women on Fashion, Beauty and Personal Style edited by Michelle Tea, and numerous chapbooks. She believes that art can create change in the world, that dirt smells like magic and gets lost in the woods on purpose.  

Emchy