By: Ally Harris
I WAS BORN IN A CLOUD
Day’s sound bloats in milky
soup, relentless crow
marking dawn’s flashes,
idiot clock that meters
out insanity, plants three
planets, my fabulous dunces,
insignificant as the ants
that stitch a movable corset
between grass and fern
squash and weed, on purple
night which pills in rabid
froth upon my stubble, pure
and genderless as a clean blank
book that satisfies to mark.
But no thing shall come of it,
the wanting to get dirty and die
among the pipes exhumed
from the freezing labia
junkyard that is this Earth,
cool to touch, fickle with ice
and dirt, the brushable-off
particles that transform an object
into this recognizable life.
TRANSACT
Three is a pack
in dogs, pendulous
where mosquitoes
in skid marks of light
extend their device
through thready
leggings to extract
blood unfit for donation
in this degraded weather.
If I were given a scrap
of wire to make
a hook to gather
my food from the tiny
tube you offered
I’d like to say I’d find
a way to stave off
choking, that if
world is man
I’d be a better wanter
and bike your bluer
pants to your apartment,
but I only draw
bland pointing
in this evolved
grammar, waxy
as an apple’s
unflappable stance
in a cold patch.
Ally Harris is the author of two chapbooks of poetry, Her Twin Was After Me (Slim Princess Holdings) and floor baby (dancing girl press), and has poems in The Volta, Sink Review, Denver Quarterly, BOAAT Press, Entropy Magazine, and Bennington Review. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and hosts submission reading series and Drunk Church for Women in Portland, OR.
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