Your Posthumous Dress | Amy Pence

 Amy Pence is the author of the hybrid book [It] Incandescent, winner of the International Eyelands Award, and the poetry collections Armor, Amour, The Decadent Lovely, and the chapbook Skin’s Dark Night. Pence’s poetry, fiction, and non-fiction have appeared in a variety of publications, including Menacing Hedge, The Birmingham Poetry Review, The Oxford American, Western Humanities Review, Denver Quarterly, Poets & Writers and The Writer’s Chronicle. She lives in Atlanta. Find more at www.amypence.com.     Childhood, DismantledA hirsute giant. Maggots breeding. The mind, revealed, offers its curiosities. Among the lost objects: a happy childhood, a locket with copper-penny hair, your genitalia. I watched you knit the old story, shrinking your collusion to a nub. How like the Salvador Dalἱ, dreaming yourself genderless. Yes, you fabricated your idols. The abject body— fingerless, numberless in the creeping dawn. A hologram of things we’ll remember: ghost walkers, brittle with beaut