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CW: blood / bodily fluids and bodily harm.
from Jobs for Magical People (That Do Not Involve the Military)
Your clients are—more often than not—
helpless, a stack of unsorted organs
kept pulsating by the will locked inside
—and yet somehow beyond—
the bone shards and gristle.
At best, fingers grow in the throat
or toes form a girdle on the face
as if someone had stepped on the head
and left them there.
On occasion shapeshifting goes slantwise
and people get stuck; it has to do with
local minima in a multidimensional space
and gradient descent. You don’t always know
how the nails scraping at the esophagus
optimize anything, but you tell yourself this is
applied shapeshifting, not theory.
You unfold people. Gently or briskly or
occasionally with the use of a bone saw
—in between rounds of shapeshifting magic,
because there are times when it helps
to hold back a little. Your biceps are strong.
You recover the human template—
you feel it attracts the shape, pulls it to itself
as limbs snap to the all-familiar pattern;
usually, but not always. You never force it—
you know about variation, about
the manifold ways to be embodied.
You know about monsters; about yourself.
You understand about skin flaps and
a ribcage knotting around itself like
one of those old-time bags for produce
when you go grocery shopping.
The lung, the stomach, the liver
flopping around. You can sort it out.
The end goal is, always, the client’s satisfaction:
to make them look like they’ve intended to look
as opposed to your own best guess. It can be felt
reverberating through tissue, when you get there—
a soft burbling certainty and a rightness
in the way muscle attaches to tendon,
tendon clings to bone; in the leathery wings
and the ridges along the spine, in the heel spurs,
the three eyes and the ears that can seal closed,
finally, in the outrushing breath;
in the unspoken but tangible relief.
Author’s note:
I started working on this poem cycle of magical jobs that do not involve the military after the current Israeli invasion of Gaza started. I think speculative literature does influence, even if only to a small extent, what people consider possible; and I found myself reflecting on how so much of it shows magic as necessarily warlike. I wanted to come up with alternatives, the more the better—I encourage everyone to do likewise and also find ways to act in your own environment against war.
