by Beth Gordon

Unravel the seaweed around your ankles: 
ankles laced with brine. Gather the wind
as bright as copper coins: an eruption in 
the carpenter’s sink. Something is amiss.         Sing here.

Stand in the nursery corner and sing there.  
Explain the difference in ten words or less. 

Describe the moan in the back of every 
throat: trapped antenna, broken wasp. 
Carry your things to higher ground far 
from nesting snakes: a brewing of 
amphetamine and acid. Open the door. 

A truck as white as clean laundry idles in the alley.
Rot gut whiskey. Rot gut gin. Rot gut sunshine.

                                                  Back away.

Beth Gordon is a poet, mother and grandmother currently living in Asheville, NC. Her poetry has been published in Passages North, RHINO, EcoTheo Review, Into the Void, Pidgeonholes, SWWIM, Pithead Chapel, and others. Her full-length poetry collection, This Small Machine of Prayer, is forthcoming from Kelsay Books in July 2021 and her chapbook, The Water Cycle, is forthcoming from Variant Literature in November 2021. She is Managing Editor of Feral: A Journal of Poetry and Art, Assistant Editor of Animal Heart Press, and Grandma of Femme Salve Books.