milks the errors
"circular tail segments"
bob & coil her crown
bob is a nick is a mark is flavor
seasoned for a dirt mouth
puffed to meet her flesh
it’s a constriction
this rattle this marriage
licked red with its milking
cupped in a lap of meat
her is drip of dis
her is flesh tree rings she circles to outrun
her dis drips in the milk
her gait a canter a wallop
bra boa off her downy her new
her race is a dis of errors
she gnashes and gnashes
crows
hoarse & cawing
wild voice
in the elder arms around you
black & black as aglow
makes thunder cracks branches
how startling the revolt
has not claimed us
sooner
black & black
as voice does
the reckoning cry above
its stealth and wingspan
a breath we take in
the heart a molt
of feathers and expansion we move in trees
swoop
our mouths are
to the ground
feeding
pre-teen ditch
rough hair unwashed & slept in a face i mouthed under in little stab gasps
big skins rubbing against thighs and little girl leggings a misfit interrogation
they were at the window panic in a crescendo of flapping i crossed the street
mouths hung open lemon yellow laughter the i of taking it like a meat girl
*
nipples flapping
asphalt skins
a glow of calling - streetlights
a ditch in pink wilderness
meat girl is grief
cut off peeled bark
dull hums
*
The ditch is a teen age girl
the girl is a ditch
all the little inserts
the pink gooey centers
what hardens inside
A girl is a gash is a rut
is sore knees
a bedtime story a lullaby of woundings
how the little matches strike
a calling a namesake
what the blood culls
dirt lot
feral girl who took to the woods yes we hopped off that bus as it left the rotting pit of Staten
Island refuse refusals commerce neon utopia of boredom nostalgia i ate it slaked in mud the
rotting garbage patch of my suburban commerce i slaked the mud over my lips a wanting to
enter you as the rain fell on your raincoat how you laid it down over the rotting ditch we fucked
on the slaking we caked it clawing mud pit i left the bus willingly as if to feel some kind of love
years and years the news called and green lines gold the perimeter a rabbit of time sounded they
had found your body in those woodswhat was left of your youth then as four days passed and
years and miles of myopia burned the residue i fell away
despite the distance my body lies in those woods our haven our placeit was mine too you
cannot claim it you lied that space was wanting and within the wanting was my
body left there in the dictum of my making a blood cull from the talons of star fuselage
wrecked atoms of my fueled mist and now i am smoke
you culled me from mud and wilderness i eat it my heart i eat it microbiota i salvage it from the
pit of longing that was my teenage wilderness a clawing up an errant mouth of wounds a moth
how tender the flaking of its gossamer and fuck you wings i slicked you like the vulnerable pink
you were soft tissue and rupture is glisten as i move the shovel with my foot
and aim the dirt for your mouth
bury bury dirt lot utopia bury bury the margins i fucked on that line a slit of shimmering lies
otitis media
the sound of you is underwater to yourself
who knows when this clot will mesh the cells return to the circles selves
little singing cells - an ocean behind the ear
heartbeat blurs & it’s been days cycling with a thrush building back the little spring of
hairs
there is a space in the declivity don’t mind the dead skin
there is a space in the rounding don’t mind the ovulation (multiplying eggs)
coil of replication dazzle in the buzzing dapple
under the tree canopy just me and the winding
whoosh the sound of you is foreign to the cilia
light moving away from itself & forming patterns among the rock face
it climbs here in the muffled chaos a kind of silence
or how to tune out the world when all is climbing
that rockface a shelter coven i don when the brimming crescendos the much i seek
curiosity in the cells laughter in the carrion
so much a matter of seeking living seeking apples & crisp air
the satisfying crunch of life beneath
the sound of you is under
Melissa Eleftherion grew up in Brooklyn. She is the author of huminsect (dancing girl press, 2013), prism maps (dusie kollektiv, 2014), Pigtail Duty (dancing girl press, 2015), the leaves the leaves (forthcoming 2016), green glass asterisms (forthcoming 2016), and several other chapbooks and fragments. Her poems and prose have been widely published, & recently appear in Entropy, Lunch Ticket, Negative Capability, Pith, Queen Mob's Teahouse, So to Speak, Tinderbox, & Vector Press. Melissa is a librarian with Mendocino County Libraries where she creates programs & manages the Teen Services department. In the wee hours, she manages the Poetry Center Chapbook Exchange which she created & developed for The Poetry Center at San Francisco State University. More of her work can be found @apoetlibrarian & www.apoetlibrarian.wordpress.com.