S.Marie Clay

Your stature suggests
the sleep of a museum,

fifty coffins piled into
a single room; waxen

figures with mouths
furiously cut open, hair

from possum’s shield, eyes
sliced from poached eggs,

those oblong white flags.
The smell is what makes you

real. Things go bad.
When I was a grasshopper

child, I imagined
the moon, a white apple

whose sweetness
drew the ants

away from every red
vault at once. Today,

I cannot remove
the onion garden

from the above place,
ready to receive teeth

marked with
the history of Spain,

rows of civil guards &
rotten donkeys.

S.Marie Clay earned her MFA from Columbia, Chicago where she was a Follett Scholar and curator of Word 6: An Architecture of Multi Modal Poetry. Her work has appeared most recently in Drunken Boat, Eleven Eleven, Columbia Poetry Review, Caliban, H_NGM_N, Thrush Poetry Journal, Forklift Ohio, and others. She is the founder and editor-in-chief of Black Tongue Review.