Issue 22

Erin Slaughter

I wish I was the grieved body of a hare

body that sweetbox of dirt I do not believe in

I would like to be memorialized as sheets of topaz

melting in the weeds in front of you

protect your poinsettia light from me

my light an alien young my blue light

starring you to pieces and you letting it

slip through the evergreen fear door

I want to put my mouth on eight regions of a torso blamelessly

I want an island a whole ugly island

and please to melt lakewater there

all the horses I have never met

hot and shifting in their pelts

my wraith wants a socket to bleed its yowling, my sunflower wants a fleshsuit of its own

they pace and sigh and never stop telling

what the concrete-pouring workmen did

to them and what they invited

behind their aquamarine fear doors and why and please

someday I am beautiful?

and please someday I am claimed

by else than the fleas

that grow immense and flay themselves

in my huckleberry bed

I want the ocean to look on me in a marriage way

but if it did would I run my horses through fishmarkets to worship

or would it be water the dread shape of getting

what I wanted

the trees say there is no vector to rejoin us

the graveyard says our electricity is so loud

lizards crying their bodies in and out of the floodnight

In the revision, all the horses are just horses

the ocean its winged self the lizards

sucked back into their pestilent nests

I wear my veil of pollen

I say goodnight to you in a way that does not require forgiveness