Body Poem III + IV
by Leo Croff
Crawl into my skull through my nose
My cranial dome is a hollow glass marble
Sweat beads trickle down my glossy
Concave ceiling-wall-floor, the same
Temperature as the thumbhole of a bowling ball.
Green-blue whorls distort in curving air
Aurora from ear to ear
My head is a
Planetarium
Your chair:
My red tongue.
+
Steam valve esophagus
Carbonated cardio mania
Seltzer-blood gurgle
Intravenous bubble gun
Amphibian goulash guts.
Smelting pot skin bag
crucible
chrysalis
compost bucket.
The body is a bloody bog
Skunk cabbage armpit mushroom cloud
Noxious (with love)
A glut for slime foods
oysters
or tapioca.
The only thing I want to chew is
My fat lip.
Leo Croff is a trans writer, artist, and organizer living in Berlin, Germany. They work at the intersections of lore and theory, using diverse media to document their experiments in gender anarchy, alchemy, and ecotopia. Crafting underground mythologies from the wilderness beyond lawful genders, Leo writes poems and stories that indulge the uncanny experiences of transitioning bodies. They wrestle with smut, gore, comedy, mythology, and horror of the mundane.
As a facilitator, educator, and public speaker, Leo initiates dialogues that harmonize systemic critique with radical optimism. With a rich community of co-conspirators, they offer workshops and events that integrate queer/neurodiverse health an wellness, identity exploration, and environmental empathy. These spaces prefigure a world of dissolved hierarchies, with explicit equity between verbal and nonverbal/preverbal/postverbal languages; English is a beloved playspace and pragmatic tool, but what might we learn when we communicate beyond words?