Prose, Michaela Godding
(The average person forgets ninety percent of their dreams. I have started keeping tallies on a notepad next to my bed to keep track of all the forgetting. I wonder if endings are all we can rely on. I wonder and wonder and remember that eighty percent of the human body’s heat comes out from the head and I wonder if wondering will burn me to pieces.)
They say that life is easier when you are younger, that you can breathe and swallow at the same time until you are seven months old, that as a four-year-old you ask approximately four hundred and fifty questions a day. They say that what you can’t control you should put in god’s hands. My hands have twenty-seven bones, twenty-nine joints and at least one hundred and twenty-three other named ligaments but I wonder. I wonder about the unnamed ones. I wonder about the fifty thousand cells that will die and be replaced in the body by the time you finish reading this sentence.
Michaela Godding is a 25-year-young multidisciplinary artist. As a current creative writing teacher to high school seniors, she prioritizes using and teaching writing as a means of processing reality and trauma. She just released her debut chapbook, dwelling, through Bottlecap Press. More of her work can be found in the Connecticut Bards Poetry Review Book of 2022, Rabble Review Issues Number 4 and Number 5, and in Nova Prism's Lantern Zine. You can also find her on instagram @god.ding