Notes on Transmutation
by Gaia Rajan

In gym class the air scalds and we tumble

down the track, we wear red wristbands, we rumble up
earth. This is the same not-poem over

and over: bring the girl. She makes a game
of hunger. That summer the girls didn’t eat, our ache

transferred into concept. Just a page in a biology textbook,
our bodies ravaged into planes, out of breath, gasping

doubled on the track. The fresco of a girl hunched over
in St. Catherine’s Chapel, sitting beside the other good girls, knowing

we would sit beside a man in the dark. How we would be
quiet, and tiny, and empty of breath. How we denied everything

for that moment. Gods could never quite love
like mortals: unlike them, we grasp our own

ending. And the church gong sounded
again, and everyone applauded and transformed,

or pretended to. I failed at everything—faith, scarcity, love
of a man—wrote myself a backseat to climb into,

painted the walls until I couldn’t see anything
but dripping beige. What’s the word for when the emptiness

loves you back? When a body careens toward
its vanishing? The gym teacher blasted The Grateful Dead

and we damned all our old geometries. Our bodies disappearing
down the track, how we ran so far even we couldn’t see us.

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Gaia Rajan lives in Andover, MA. She's the cofounder of the WOC Speak Reading Series, the Junior Journal Editor for Half Mystic, the Web Manager for Honey Literary, the Managing Editor of The Courant, and the Poetry Editor of Saffron Literary. Her work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in the Kenyon Review, Muzzle Magazine, DIALOGIST, Split Lip Magazine, diode, and elsewhere. Her chapbook, 'Moth Funerals,' is out now from Glass Poetry Press, and she is a National Student Poet semifinalist. She is sixteen years old.