a baby
teaching a baby
to forgive, a birthmark
as it prays
for bite, the future
appetite
that moans
for god- and.
my half-eaten son.
the hole in his sleep.
his pawprint ears.
~
{everything I touch remembers being my hand}, available here:
~
reading, from:
apparition, or mom
at her most forgetful.
mouth, a shapeshifter’s
chew toy
godless
as a belly button
and babied
by grief.
face, face.
do they not
look
finished
ear to ear, the toddlers…
their tornado
still theirs, and today’s
sermon
still in the mind
of their mother’s
exterminator
boyfriend
who is having a thought
as rare
as his past, of a god
spotting
from a cobweb
a carcass
and deciding
the boy whose clothes have been taken will swim for hours and for hours know why the soul hides death from god
T. M. Strong comes from a small train town in New Mexico where rainstorms are precious and ravens build nests in sandstone crevices. A graduate of the Alpha Young Writers Workshop, she is currently studying Creative Writing at a small arts college.
~*~
Tiger-Ghost
The tiger pushes open the door after dusk,
flat head pressing into wire-brushed wood.
She slinks, calloused pads rasping against the floor.
A ghost. She appears behind you in the kitchen
where you have stirred the stew:
four to the right
three to the left to make seven, stretched out
to luck. Look,
her eyes, reflected in the steel pot, are gold, ochre,
last night’s sunset you think she watched from the railing
of a highway bridge. You step carefully across
the bloody, sticky tracks she left on the floor to set the table.
In winter, she brings snow.
In autumn, muddy twigs,
like wands, you line up on…
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a shadow’s private gravity (a fly on a grieving radar
years from the event of my body, we pass in the grocery. I tell your children they are attached to nothing, that my arm cast is made of fingernails, that a bruise has a shadow, and that a mouth is where a mouth goes to die. truth has no attention span. it is not my favorite dream. partly this is so because I can remember how with a grey marker I drew on my belly the easier fruits might the identified heal the recognized. (but the kids are ugly and seem to know
kingsoftrain 