To despise myself is not so simple

10% human I’m home
to a hundred trillion
little creatures
heavy as a brain
anarchists really
I find comfort in this
rub a handful of pathogens
on my belly my skin
bustles with strangers
they eat at my table
become the table

Alisha Kaplan is a native Torontonian now living in Brooklyn and pursuing an MFA in Poetry at NYU, where she is a Rona Jaffe Fellow. She is the Web/PR Editor of Washington Square Review and an Associate Editor of Narrative Magazine. You can find her work in The Chicago Tribune, Carousel, The Irish Literary Review, the Best American Poetry blog, and elsewhere. In the not-too-distant future, Alisha will be the farmer she already is.