I DON’T WANT TO BE A WOMAN

Charlotte Murray

After Fae Horsley

I want to be a slug. 

I want to meet my glistening doppelgänger 

on a hardness of branch, our bodies

mirror images of each other, 

slippery palindromes. 

I want to feel the damp sheet of evening

drawn loosely around our coupling:

not two halves locked in a semblance of whole, 

but a full set in ourselves. Each part of us 

understanding each part of the other. 

I want us to marble the dark mulch 

with tiny wet eggs. Two carryings, two layings, 

my slime coating both. Afterwards, I want to sprawl 

like a miniature seal on a beach of moss.

Just a slug. Not a gender. 

Charlotte Murray won the Silver Prize for Poetry in the Creative Future Writers’ Award 2023. She has also been placed in the E.H.P. Barnard Poetry Prize, Bangor Literary Journal’s Forty Words Competition and the East Riding Festival of Words Poetry Competition. She has been published in various magazines and anthologies, including celestite poetry and Mancunian Ways. She is a member of Hive Poetry Collective. Twitter/X: @charlouwriter.