Arkansas carves a daily ache

 

Greeted by a fat skink scuffling below a sweetgum

A tick burrows into my foot and

Constellations bloom across my skin

 

All this unarranged communal intimacy

All my friends feel like lovers

Even Trombicula autumnalis

 

Maybe it is because we lick barbecue off our fingers

Because humidity seeps into our bodies, or

We swim in lakes long after we’ve pruned

 

You are never alone here

Cicadas, thunder, air the taste of honeyed bread –

There is plenty, and there is vast hunger

 

Black vultures, their death eater beaks

Fling fawn entrails between their feet

I lay the bodies of luna moths inside a chipped cup

 

What happens when desire goes unchecked,

Unmitigated,

Untempered?

 

Today, leathery oaks speak the shape of, I will always be

Flooded corn and soybeans curve beyond view

There is much ruin, and still this tangled forest persists

 

I live inside a storied place, so my colleagues say

We are as strange as the gnarled arm of a slash pine

I stare into the spiraled worlds of dead wood all day

 

If it were safe, I would drink from a swamp

Because these are the lungs of the Earth

Carolina moonseed, climbing milkweed

 

Beauty berry, sassafras, copperheads

An occasional alligator and

The off-center tile at Trinity Cathedral

 

We want to be this close

Closer

To be devoured