the earth is a widow (her teeth are limestone)
buried twice.
she bites down.
cracks open the splintered husk of a bone —
and inside,
the bone is still screaming.
the fields are soft as bruises,
sink your hands in:
find the skin of soldiers (it never stiffens)
find teeth turned to gravel (still chattering)
find iron (find jawbone)
find jawbone.
and the jawbone says:
i was a boy
and now i am a fencepost.
the rain won’t touch this dirt,
it streaks the leaves like old blood.
ask the grass what it knows.
the ground is feral with memory (she spits up helmets)
she chokes on bullets — coughs out a rib.
and we walk on her —
bare feet brushing the cracked tongue of a trench.
her belly rises,
a half-dead breath.
underneath it all,
the war is still rotting.
sanctuary
perhaps it isn’t time for us to start feeding off of each other’s flesh and suck the sap of sorrow clean until our lips are swollen and bruised. this everyday ritual of existing and untangling and never-wanting, how warm, how it drips into the hollow of our chests where the ribcage is nothing but scaffolding for grief, sliding down the throat, how bitter, and still we drink because we hunger, then bend ourselves over the altar of another morning and it feels more like splitting, and peeling our skins off in strips and hanging them over the backs of chairs to dry, and the light filters through them, translucent, red-veined, as i pretend the world could be seen only through the membrane of our hurt, and in that slant of brightness we take our turns opening, bleeding, closing, sewing ourselves up with thread made from the very hair we shed, and all the while the house breathes around us, slow and heaving, too tired of holding us inside its brittle walls, and maybe it isn’t time, but oh—how the idea lingers, tender and obscene, that we could finally touch without the mediation of shame, taste without choking, that our mouths could be sanctuaries instead of tombs.
Sky Davis is a high school senior whose poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in ONE ART, Gone Lawn, The Scarred Tree, Cholla Needles, Neologism Poetry Journal, and others.
