One minute left
To breathe
One stream trickling away from the desert.
One bird lands to sip
Delicately, as birds will
Beakful by beakful
The sweet cool water
Life giving, nourishing.
And then with ten powerful thrusts of his wings
He is again aloft
Looking for something
Only he knows.
One bird in the sky
One story
And not much at all to tell.
But to him
It is the only story that matters.
I am a sandy beach.
I am wetwater.
I am alive alive alive
And I don’t care who knows it.
I am flaming red hair and toothy grins and purring cats and silliness
I am a wonderful thing, a thing of veins and blood and bones and wild energy
I am eternal, agnostic, atheistic, apotheostic
Knuckling to the floor
Launching myself at the TV screen
An animal
Just an animal
I sing
High clear notes that pierce
Straight to the heart
Any listener might be deceived
Might think me a tremendous soul
Drawn in by my siren song
Silly fools
Cold crayfish and starfish and seahorses
Canned potatoes and processed cheese
Are not enough to feed a siren.
I need someone with meat and red living flesh
I need something that kicks.
I need you.
I can taste your skin
Sweet salt sweat
I can taste your fear
Like stainless steel
I can taste your groan
It ripples down my throat.
I Iive for this,
Your exquisite death.
I think there are giants outside
Trees with frozen fingers drag their unfeeling claws over my roof
Something clatters, rattles bangs.
The freezing rain has brought them.
Weather carries monsters in its wake.
When humans stay fearfully inside their homes,
Creatures of fancy cavort in the open air.
When something reaches inside of you
It causes a ripple.
If you are properly filled
This ripple is enough to spill over
Trickling out in warm saltwater.
abandoned
all around her is emptiness
dark emptiness
where there should be pulsing warmth,
gentle voices of her parents talking to her
instead the cold leeches her skin
she is unwanted
she can’t comprehend
this bright pain
this un-flesh
splitting her from their joined bodies
cutting away the comfort of her mother.
mute, half-formed,
what she mourns she does not know.
she grieves her past, present, and future
loneliness stops her heart.
Sarah D. Silvey 