Undo | Amy Crutchfield

First, your pain, like being on meat hooks.

Next, each false assurance:

normal, normal, normal, normal.

Put the outsize screen to sleep – white snake –

let us unsee it.

Dismantle the table where they stretched you,

attach their springs to our sneakers.

Back to the peculiar studio, this time I tell him,

“No.” I hand you back your clothes.

Sequences like funnels doors like valves,

you hand me trust, I hand you up.

Unawake and unasleep, unspeaking courses

down your cheeks.

Oh, speed me further yet, back to the patient gene.

Let me implore it – stay true.

Let Aaron’s miracle be reversed

– unbend –

and staff us comfort still.

Amy Crutchfield is a poet living in Melbourne. Her work has been published in APJ, Westerly, foam:e, Island, The Age and The Poetry Review and is forthcoming in the Canberra Times. A selection of her poems were published in side by side translation in China in the poetry journal Enclave. She won the 2020 Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize.