This Is How You Hold It – Channa Goldman

January 5, 2026

Any hill on which you’ve stood is a hill I’m willing to die on

watch me with your back turned, rewiring the earth

My biggest sin seems to be that I want to be loved

at any cost and still capitalize off the losses

I see you in everything as everything expands itself

inwards, to the endless flux of your name

In the aftershock, I crack a wishbone to the sound

of your seismic touching. I watch the mother cow

feed her child and imagine what it would feel like

to be milked to death face down, belly out and bloated

tending to the soil as it bursts with bones from both

our bodies. I listen for your chest

I tell you how I’d hold it.

 
Exegesis

 
After every kiss to the kneecaps, there is a splitting in my palm
along the lifeline where the oracle told me I could cry up mountains
from all the bodies who’d come before me. Inside on the couch, I kneel
and submit to the halo around your eyes while my Soundcloud downloads
a song about the love frequency, and I wonder if I can finally delete my Hinge.

Whose body, if not my body—landed in its naked planet
telling you how to look but not where
ugly spot on the sidewalk where the shit has greened
and I taste your shampoo along my fingertips as I bring it up
the esophagus, veining its apotheosis pulmonary and throbbing

with whispers of how I want to swallow all your shame
and strip you naked as though you’ve just come out the womb
and have been harmed yet by no one.
I think life is beautiful—my shower-head holds to the sediment
the way I sit beneath my synthetic silk sheets and tell myself

that if it rains tonight, it means you’ll text me back
and maybe all these endocrine disruptors can convince me
that falsity isn’t so bad. That when my fingerprint has finally become
undetectable from the dyshidrotic eczema no doctor could cure
it’s just another way I can feel the pulse, congealed beneath its blanket of pulp
and its generation of promises.

 
Tapestry

 
There are many ways to say I deserve this, to stiffen at the knee where it once would soften to a bend. Unending is my infinity where I demand inimitable standing, a ground on which I swallow my own spit unfaltering and dauntless in the mouth, knowing that I am owner. And I grow larger as I go on to embody myself against the demarcation of any cry which shrieks, of any cry which shrills, of any cry which sounds of sinkage. There are many ways one could ask me how I know that I deserve it, why my claim can land itself within any gesture able to hold its own motion in a world of pregnant drafts and aching bodies that often shift the water to riptide.

And there are just as many ways of biting back, of refusing to whiten my teeth or laser the ingrowns as I grin my skin to wrinkle and age. There are just as many ways of taking the nail and sticking it in my own gash and saying I bleed on the terms of my own opening, not at the request of how I happen to have been torn, into but not out of, split but not undone.

I love the violence because it is mine, I love the dust as it settles only to be hated, to be removed, to be told it does not belong on the only surface it has ever touched. I love the filth as it craters me in its breadth exactly as it is, a cradle which nurses both the nakedness and the shame until it dissolves, becoming deliquescent. Loss of face, the universal solvent. Placed right in the center of my arms.

There are many ways to show you how I cracked a furcula fused from my own clavicle, and how I sung the song of its splitting until my saliva spilt out in pools around the ricochet of my heartbeat. But first I’d have to flash you my tongue and let you hold the muscle raw. I’d have to take you back to the smell of chlorine as it saw me bleached, the midwife’s first time bearing witness to a water birth. I’d have to offer you the epidural while simultaneously begging you to refuse it, a tempest pouring down against divine premonition and the sacred forecast written on the body in skin. I’d have to tell you that there is not and never will be any answer—only light as it pours in for us to surrender in the bliss of its burn.