Receptor

Ben Russell

After Margaret Atwood’s “[you fit into me]”

The pupil is a tunnel. Things come
in. Things get stuck. I am never

not seeing you, still. The animal
curve of your back as you bit

into me. Were you expecting
a center? Something hard to bite

back? I have no more hard parts,
only hollows, soft and slick. Tongue

between my teeth, you taught me
that I am a thing to be entered.

You cored me long before, made me
a fruit pitted and skinned. So easy

to eat. Did it ever make you
sick? All that sweet sameness

all the way through, like light
through the hole of the eye.

Writer’s Notebook

The title of this piece has two meanings: “receptor” as in a cell of the eye, as well as a recipient of something. Even something unwanted. This began as a poem about being groomed. It became a study of the receptor—the survivor—as a body consumed or passed through, yet enduring, despite. The traveler or the traveled. What we do—and what is done to us—stays with us, or in us, or on us. None of us make it through unchanged. But we make it through. That’s the light at the end of the tunnel.

About the writer

Ben Russell (he/they) is a writer from San Francisco. This is his first publication. Find them everywhere at @bnrssll.