Cosmological Touch

To mitigate this pain you must massage the void.
Nevermind glossing the abdomen in almond oil, hot
compress, menthol temples, fine milled licorice root,
nevermind fascia and muscle. It’s all carnal noise.

Issue 7

https://manyworlds.place/issue-7/amber-dawn/

by Amber Dawn


To mitigate this pain you must massage the void.
Nevermind glossing the abdomen in almond oil, hot
compress, menthol temples, fine milled licorice root,
nevermind fascia and muscle. It’s all carnal noise.

It’s all racket and backache, spasm and babble.
To mitigate this pain you must massage the void.
Anything of clay or split fruit, egg or hominid—
let go. You’re already reaching for the unreachable. 

These are not directives of nihilism and despair. 
In negative decibels, in intangible density, rejoice.
To mitigate this pain you must massage the void.
Emptiness is an erogenous zone, a collapsed star,

black with absence and oxytocin. Sanctify and toy,
lubricate the dark energy. A body transposed by pitch                    
and edge. Love transforms you into what you love.
To mitigate this pain you must massage the void.


AMBER DAWN is a writer living on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations (Vancouver, Canada). Her debut novel Sub Rosa (2010) won the Lambda Literary Award for Debut Lesbian Fiction and the Writers’ Trust of Canada Dayne Ogilvie Prize. Her memoir How Poetry Saved My Life: A Hustler’s Memoir (2013) won the Vancouver Book Award. Her collection of long poems My Art Is Killing Me and Other Poems (2020) was a finalist for the Jim Deva Prize for Writing that Provokes. Her third collection “Buzzkill Clamshell” explores chronic pain and psychosis through the monstrously feminine is forthcoming in Spring 2025.