THE MEAT WORLD
Courtship is another word for slaughter.
Mud-blood hip-deep. I kept winter
in the bones of my right arm. I sent
you a shaft in an old glass vial. The note
attached said “cry here.” The tears came
so easily that year.
My body is always open now, and there
are all these arrows hanging from our skins,
crawled up growl-howling.
This is what it’s like to be a girl.
SOLSTICE
Moon blood in the fox hollow;
fox hole a type of fantasy.
We envy the fox and her magnificent stink.
Take off the cloth, wear
an ink dark tree in your rib
bones. When you breathe
a little hollow — holler out
your want-needles, your wish-
bones, dolls made out of dollars
who teeter-totter like little daughters. Dot
in the fox eye, blood moon, slit near
the pupil. Our room contracts. Convex
in the crumb maze, the fur loom.
Sweep out the ash bin and see those ravens
there circling the half-bloom, roving the scar-light
with dark feathers curled in script.
I stoke embers and spark the air-dark blooms
that hid our marrows for 30 days. I let you lick
me just a little. My fingers fed us through the weather.
Cast a dance to make us free. Your eyes pull down
the walls but I burn them before
they even touch the ground.
BLINK WITCH
I stick-click my way to the door that hinges on a hair
of bone, flossing antlers under-cover of water black
with blood-mud. The girth of a whale is broad and full
and is inked in unbelievable sadness. A crow perched
on the rib of when we were less lonely, mast fluttering
horizons where fins slid, slicing them open like loose
nets. All this talk about confession and forgiveness:
it tires me, flattens us.
The truth is that I love you no matter what.
It’s so obvious birds write in with their wings
and bees sing it with their buzz. & yet I’ve lost
you in the snow drift — the thread I threw
was red for just a minute. In the blinding
snow-light I consider joining the cemetery’s colony
of feral cats. I’m only guessing that they’d have me.
from Sin in Wilderness
Michelle's animal familiar is a little white dog named Sarah. They like to listen to Kurt play the guitar.
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