I awoke to find that my arm was missing
Vanished in the night
Only my shoulder remained,
Loyal, as it was, to my spine.
Calling a meeting of the self that had stayed behind,
I asked if anyone had seen the arm go.
Feet had not
Unsurprisingly
As they rarely see anything outside of my socks
(It being dead of winter)
Ribs had not either,
The self-absorbed fools
Only fingers had felt it.
The five that remained
They whispered that it was a gradual hiding away.
A soft lightening of balance.
Piece by piece the arm tiptoed out of the body.
And so we searched for her.
Eyes peering
One hand grasping.
When tongue first tasted her scent on the air
Our stomach lurched like a loose canon
She tasted of loneliness
And fear.
Why did she hide herself away?
Again, it was the fingers who figured it out first.
When you try to make yourself smaller
Sometimes you don’t get to choose
Who leaves first.

About the artist...

Catherine Woods is a Chicago-based painter and special effects makeup artist. She studied Interdisciplinary arts at Columbia College Chicago, where she received her Bachelors in 2015. In the studio, she is intrigued by the balance between the beautiful and the disturbed. Outside of the studio she writes poetry in the spare hours between working and sleeping. This is her first published piece.