RITUAL EMBODIMENT

By KT Herr

‍ ‍

‍ ‍ for D

I wash my
face and my face
is holy. Brush
my teeth, and
look! my teeth
are holy. So
easy, we could
bottle it. Holy,
even, my grief—
saddled with
what, I do not
know. Some days
ambivalence. Some
days masochism.
Some high lord
who wrecked his way
into my early
Sabbath kitchen
and now presides
with the supposed
authority
of Heaven and
Rohypnol
over the wind shear
of excised
memory. (When I
desert you, love,
it’s in that
shadowplace
Before I’m living.)
he was famous for
his boxes, Cornell
made film collage
spliced from cuts
of East of Borneo.
Dreamily, through blue
glass, the starlet
stutters and
waves. It helps
if I imagine

my missing time
this way, snipped
from my drugged
world, stitched into
a furling reel
someone else’s
methodical hand
fondles, mends.
Its edges feverishly
tended, like this
body I go on
with: a box, an
eclipse, a precipice,
and yet—or so
you keep telling me—
divine.





KT Herr (they/she) is a writer, stepparent, and curious person with recent work appearing or forthcoming in *The Adroit Journal, Bear Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, and the 2026 Monarch Queer Literary Awards* anthology, among others. KT is a Four Way Books board member, a poetry editor at Gulf Coast Journal, and an Inprint C. Glenn Cambor Doctoral Fellow at the University of Houston.