It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
through the blue behind my eyelids, i reach for all of it— the hill of ivy fat with wolf spiders and sow bugs hollow bones thinning under the cedar raccoons washing their fingers of fish at the water’s edge. spooning the thin lines between things into my wet mouth and spooling them haphazard around my teeth, making a golden net of my throat— i must have turned my brain into this mess: purple an octopus’ cheek and also a bruising scar from falling along the creek not duplicated, just synapsed in some misfiring imagination they won’t catch on the heavy films. in st. paul, the tiger lillies begin to bloom. i imagine instead the alevin’s yolked throat oyster mushroom squatting against a nurse log’s back, slick and dark with rain nasturtiums crowded thick along the estuary’s stink the quickest short circuit nostalgia buzzes and winter crawls out of me in a silvered run sharpens itself at the back of my skull. once, i picked a tongue-pink petal from a rhododendron and touched it to my own— i was always growing where i shouldn’t thickening the string between each disparate thing, like my knee a facsimile of st. helens’ shuffled summit making me ≥ a mountain— and in this tube, my stomach green as lake light still incubates, seasonlessly, the flat leaves lying in wait for the right flower or the most poignant tongue or the good brain whichever the pain can invent first. here and back then, i have the most golden throat where all the places are one place in the swallow. they won’t see it in the reading, the light made up of so many knotted strings so as to build the hottest sun ruining the images like too much hell— i exist in an overactive hemisphere i do feel the suboccipital light, a daybreak. it’s just not right here, although my blue fingers always reach even as i lie metalless and still.
Clair Dunlap is a librarian on the Olympic Peninsula where she lives with her partner and their speckled dog. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry Northwest, EcoTheo Review, BOOTH, The Hopper, and more.
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