Thrift Store Fur by Aimee Seu

Winner of the 2020 Los Angeles Review Literary Awards, in the category of poetry.
Final Judge: Francisco Aragón

What world did I open
by finding you—forty dollars of
milk-pale beast. Each of our lives
started over. My hoodie laid back
over thick emperor collar, purple gloves
like crocuses blooming in snow.
In my room, in paste jewelry & black petals
of eyeshadow, I lord over the mirror.
Driving alone, just a coral slip
underneath, rolling a blunt, mobwife of midnight
convenience store, buying peach rings,
white chocolate & a lighter
engraved with the initial of everyone
whose name starts like mine.
O, my tacky & shameless score.
Glamorous hair-shirt, wolvin
cloak of thick cloud. Shell of body
for the body, & I regret this
but why waste you now?
Vicious in lipstick, my canines smile.
Creature, you have made me so feral.
If a girl leaving the bar took you
off the wall, I’d bite & claw.
If someone threw blood
I’d wear you stained. I gargle
a deep growl, my eyes like two circles
of lit glass in the dark. Unable to feel
a cell phone’s buzz through the lining
or the frigid gust of a departing train
or enclosing cold at early sundown.
These long nights used to scare me.
Now I live forever in heat.
Once, drunk & stranded, without keys, phone
or sense, curled on the porch swing in November,
you saved me. Knees pulled to chest
and you, blanket of chance, secondhand
destiny, guardian pelt, silver & coarse
as moon-landing photographs.
As if my whole body were mane.
As if the winter were soft, & the wind
something sweet whispered softly
in my ear. Each of my breaths a howl,
each a ghost. Something woke in me hungry
that had slept for so long. Now my body
in a blizzard, is a window fogged by heat.

Aimee Seu is the author of Velvet Hounds (forthcoming from Akron University Press, 2022), winner of the Akron University Poetry Prize. She graduated from the University of Virginia’s Creative Writing MFA in 2020 as a Poe/Faulkner Fellow where she was recipient of the 2019 Academy of American Poets Prize. Her other awards include the 2020 Henfield Prize for Fiction, the 2016 Academy of American Poets Prize at Temple University, the Temple University 2016 William Van Wert Award and the Mills College Undergraduate Poetry Award. She was a semifinalist in the 2019 New Guard Vol. IX Knightville Poetry Contest judged by Richard Blanco. Her poetry, fiction, and nonfiction have appeared in Ninth Letter, Pleiades, BOAAT, Redivider, Raleigh Review, Diode, Minnesota Review, Blacklist, Adroit, Harpur Palate, and Runestone Magazine. She’s a Philadelphia native currently living in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Photo by Roberto Rodriguez