Corpus

Frey Smith

Frey Smith is a nonbinary creative from the West Midlands of the UK, currently based in South Wales. Frey’s writings can be found on Substack, under the name Paper Shark Writes, while crafts, collages, and textile creations can be found on Instagram (@papersharkmakes).

Corpus

A group of words is called a body; It moves and it breathes on the pag

When I roll down the path, it’s a statement — The hum of my motor speaks of aid and refusal.

When I lie breathless, my pulse jumps between my upper and lower jaw, Clamped between my teeth like a metaphor.

I sat with my grandmother once, filling out paperwork, Passing between us the names of diabetes, lymphoedema, retinopathy.

Her ageing figure is the one which taught me how to read; When she could no longer make out the words for her allergies, I listened to the clatter on the packets and spelled the names aloud.

I remember two things of my father clearly; The limp and the accent.

I write poems full of bodies; The hand upon my hand, the street corner overdose, The landscape of stretch marks, the map from waist to thigh,

That summer night I bled, and staggered, Reaching for the phone, spilling out speech As I wept nonsense sentences into the floorboards.

‘Haptics’ means ‘how we talk through touching’. When the dying are too far gone for words, we hold their hands.

There are verses in my bones, over and over; My pain, like a repeated quote.

But if my aching is a paragraph, Then let it be the line when I’m lost at the roadside, The text above the arrow that says:

‘You are here.’ ‘Where do you need to be?’