Slime Flux
were they blue or red the circling birds in that one dream i had as a small child like the birds above a bonked head in the cartoons though unlike the cartoons they were sometimes not birds but penises phallic circling avians if i keep my head down tailbone tucked like a dog caught eating the trash unable to help it maybe i can find a place with no eyes how could i not hear under their words that they couldn’t trust me i become birds that peck for blood try to dig it out through my cuticles all of it like how I shouldn’t have told anyone how i shouldn’t have drawn adult genitalia on a notepad in the dining room how i shouldn’t have worn so little how i shouldn’t have misunderstood boundaries how i shouldn’t have masturbated in the hammock at the monastery caught by a French monk who wouldn’t look at me for the rest of the month pungent sludge oozes from a stump i look it up: bacteria enters a wound rotting the wood from the inside a bird comes down to land on it and quickly pivots away a red bird
Omit Reveal
Women who hold their secrets
carry them like unspoiled fruit.
for once, my mouth remains shut,
delighted by an empty table
of un-invited guests.
++
I am not the moon
who would never slap my hand
and say, this is not for you. I practice
undressing: not the clothes, says the moon,
the rest of it. Each night reveals
more round and pouring light.
My unscolded hand
dares to roam.
++
So sweet my proposition, not
smash me through the earth, descend me
through the deluge
into deliverance. When he climbed,
his feet slid into stone fissures slick with brook,
subsumed by elemental shadow.
My body has never not been
mounds and pools.
++
I rip used journals
instead of saving them,
secrets too still on the page, not
galloping through a field,
a black stag running. You’ll never catch
these gnawing crevices,
that sleek shine.
++
A forest siren– her sound slips
into my mind, slowly seduces
me to a red door in the deep
wood. My hands shake
as I open and enter.
I never tell anyone.
Death-Gathered Crows
We shout to the Artist
who has blessed our brother (an
irresistible !
canvas)
where he lay
with speckles of glitter-brown mud–
a s p l a t t e r
of their brush
along his feathers of
roving blueblackviolet
and his pose: chest out wings wide mouth open Amen!
as if soaring to heaven surely
the artist could not help but notice
such a being prone to
rapture Amen!
the wet dirt road a perfect paint
to dapple.humble.adornment
upon the altar of his decadent
body. We Yell Amen!
not just to warn but to revere
the before and after and before and after
especially
the after
We shout, Artist, for
our shared fondness
of the dead.
Rae (she/her) is a queer writer, therapist, and homesteader living in a holler in North Carolina. She is currently interested in writing that explores our relationship to land and to body, particularly in the aftermath of natural disaster.
