Poetry

That You Use Your Body To Escape Your Skin

Growing up black white trash it’s not that you

Are and you never think you are

Part of the home you go back home to

 

Twenty years later and two thousand miles

Lord just to look at it

 

Growing up black white trash you live

Lord in a separate world you live a-

lone in a separate world     and you don’t really even

 

Live in that world you live where your hope goes

like any child you follow it like any child

You aren’t prepared to follow it

 

Lord restless through and you say yes to

Anything anybody wants to     / Do with your body you

follow your hope

 

Through anybody’s     Lord desire

Like any no one’s child

 

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Cover of TLR's "Do You Love Me?" issue
cover art by Gillian Laub / Courtesy Benrubi Gallery

Shane McCrae is the author of four books of poetry, most recently The Animal Too Big to Kill, and the recipient of a Whiting Writer’s Award and a fellowship from the NEA. He teaches at Oberlin College.

“That You Use Your Body To Escape Your Skin” was originally published in “Do You Love Me?” (TLR, Spring 2015).