Arsenic Lobster
poetry journal |
Issue Twenty-one Winter 2009 |
From: The Toyota Gets It Melissa Koosmann A deer makes a little collapse in your chest. First the two of you still together, and then your stomach swoops = it leaps a bush to escape. Its fear you felt all along. Pine needles brush the back of your neck. Your body. A flock of warblers chatters through the trees. The skin pulls tight around you. * Nearby, a man and a woman pitch a new tent, the latest. Yours, erect, is a travesty. On the bare earth, flat rocks hold flaps down. Deer rattle bushes as dinner sits unpacked in your stillness. When she rests, the woman places her hand on her pregnant bulge. You whittles. Quail ruckus. * Crickets sing their pulses up the canyon down. The rhythm drives into rocks and trees and you. It makes a chorus or a conversation, one. You strains to figure which the crickets need for themselves and why. What fits together doesn’t quite: grass fits ground to its roots and also fits itself to constricting cracks in roads. You, settled for now on a rock, tries to understand, but the grass remains mute to your queries. * Flint, broken, a blade for killing game = you cuts your finger and makes a fist to dam the falls. The fist is clung dirt, is the skull of a mad dash cottontail. Flat back your ears and loose. It’s fine to bleed for now. The you soaring above you smells the wound and knows it isn’t fatal. * A mine shaft’s mouth, abandoned, provides a damp and temporary home. Scat moss spraypaint nutshells. Your mouth lets loose: “Be.” This seems right: “Be.” But how? Being interacts. The shaft’s lazy echo comes from you, but it’s not. Here the distant clatter of mice. |
About Melissa Koosmann |