[gifts]
Really, I want to fill your chasm with pretty bits of bone, shell—
to glitter your peripheral vision. Were I, too, empty I’d manifest
plastic to scatter through my cavities. I’d search the once underwater
dust of a dam-dried canyon—with tender shovel and brush
I’d find just the thing. I’d sweep the sugar from trinkets, from hides
slinked off of mammals long-ago evolved for land. I’d hand you
a Kate Spade with multiple carrying options—oxskin tanned and fashioned
into pockets. I’d buy you a coffee. And if (God forbid) I locked us in
to some sub-prime loan scheme, we could always float our material
assets. If you’d let me, O Sweet, O Empty, I’d love you full
of treasures forever ready to liquefy. I’d give you hands. O
Sweet, I’d famish you if it meant I could fill you back up.
WHEREIN I MAKE A RELIABLE BLOODSNACK
Rivers of me, really—tributaries of the heart
that clip into insect gullets with
such pretty reliability. The histamine bloom
at the slurp site, the flesh splotch
blood-gathering. Is this my food chain notch?
Do you ever think how the whole
purpose of being a fruit is to rot
around a seed and feed it of
your flesh? Completion is a sweet ass
nectar, bloodmeal churned into earth
with such reliability, but pretty
still. The poison sits inside the people
and the people still look
pretty. The clip of an insect gullet into
me—the clip of a gun unloaded
wholly. Click click and there goes
home. Rivers of me, really,
histamine bloom at the impact,
how city itches where crimson spills—
do you know what blood does that doesn’t
churn into dirt? Really, I wonder. No bloodmeal,
just puddles. But these little bits of my liquid
are frittered off in insects and I am lucky
for my blood to be frittered, feeding, lucky
to be siphoned through proboscis, not
spilled. May we all seep in slow clips, itch.
Note: Italicized text in “Bloodsnack” is from Darcie Dennigan’s “The Feeling of the World As a Bounded Whale is the Mystical.”
Jessica Morey-Collins is a Pushcart nominated MFA student at the University of New Orleans, where she works as associate poetry editor for Bayou Magazine. She won the 2016 Andrea Sanders Gereighty/AAP Award and was a finalist for the 4th Annual Gigantic Sequins Poetry Contest. Her poems and essays can be found or are forthcoming in Pleiades, scissors & spackle, The Pinch, The Boiler Journal, Animal Literary Journal and elsewhere.