Katherine Meikle

You close your eyes like ginkgo leaves

Smile at the sky

Cry at the trees.

And every time you think of me

I’m in the changing of the breeze.

Let the spring inside

The quiet of your mind

Step into the rapture

Slip out of time

Skin, a silken membrane

All the dew that it contains

Back to the ground with your remains.

2022

As the letters unfold

and the dust, and the cold

and old, old bakers wife

with cataracts on her teeth

makes sausages with meat that the dogs won't eat.

In the house with the grown man crying in the bathroom

and the lame horse that nobody wants to shoot

and the shame, and the games

that the children play,

as they run over the poppies they didn't know were planted

with the seeds of soldiers marrow.

2018

March your bitten fingers

along my décolletage.

February feels

colder this year.

Very nearly almost

dead.

A kiss, a shot,

to the back of my neck.

Warm me up.

Breathe your smoke into

the hollows of my throat.

Skin so thin,

those scapulae like dorsal fins,

nearly breaking the surface of your flesh.

Indigo veins, invertebrate ink,

a bruise, a plume,

of  black dye in water

clear as Venetian glass.

I want to touch that skin, that

living latex.

How can something so slim restrain all that–?

Water. Blood.

The pressure of its plasma

pulsing, palpitating

for escape.

Unspool the thread,

let it seep out slowly.

Bead it with scarlet gems, rubies

are Nature’s currency.

A slice, a taste,

a vent to ease the burden.

You are opaque.

The crimson current

drained from your cadaver,

now rests upon my tongue,

my hands,

my Crest white teeth. 

2017