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    This is a moveable beast.

    Tie This up and take This everywhere. The backs of This’ knees all sicked from This’ scratching. This can bellow a balloon of semen. Ask your mother to dinner and This will only pass time. This is too much for a mediated form. This is too golden for a train car. This is too loud for a street too harsh for a pond and This is gonna vomit to make you hear This. This is the passing of a feeling you ran from toward your own dying. Take it down with menstrual ink: you can’t ask This’ middle name. The verb of This’ breathing is just the adjective of your alienation, which This holds onto in the sweet sweet dreams when the cock’s inside This. This wants to know if you hear This because This says it’s time to let the dog out it’s time to dance. This barks at you from under the covers. This snatches love like your mother losing to her virginity, like the same silent tongue licking many cultured clits. This could explode. This will leak on your first born. This will shoot you dead on your wedding day. This will gnaw on your cock and make a new one from the breast flesh This bit off of you. Honey, they said, people don’t like it when you talk about guns, they said. This said that people who are scared of guns have never fucked one. This is limited by the image of your face across from This. Will you take This home now? This is ready for the falling anthem in your pockets. This is ready to deep throat your theories of sustainable identity. This is ready to enema your criminal innocence. This hasn’t earned the right to feel pain. This hasn’t been made prostrate enough to any almighty construction to seek forgiveness. This asks for lashings. Fifty lashings on This.



    biochemical physiology

    my gonads shrink at the sight of it
    they refuse the suffering lineage
    they birth a little creole with my dream-speech
    that’s knife-quickenin’ and guilty
    i know
    it all depends on the light
    i know
    i know and you don’t
    its facetious presentations its prismatic triggers
    its laid out as 600,000 square miles of
    SANCTUARY! SANCTUARY!
    that’s soon wilting soon burning
    my gonads shrink at the sight of it

    my seasonal hyperphasia welcomes
    deciduous forests this perfect timing
    for migration for escape
    it was a middle-distance migration
    south to north
    i was a middle-distance runner
    fast and long
    he was a middle-distance relative
    young and knowing
    it was a middle-distance assault
    set and blurred

    tar balls pebble the shore
    the spill spilling something locked and quite
    so it gushes out
    it can’t be capped
    and so i know it’s time

    they filled it up they shucked it
    they tucked a killer in the water
    Corexit! Corexit!
    linin’ my limp tongue
    accosting orange boons linin’
    the edges of homes and water
    let’s get to the cardiotoxicity of the matter
    bluefin tuna splayed along the Beltway

    the family reunion will go on
    the snowy egret still touches down
    still dives with silver precision
    into poisoned surf
    Grandmere turns 81 regardless
    so we puff our poison a few miles south
    set up camp for The Last Summer
    they say
    they say it could be the last summer
    before the water’s a slick mix
    of quick fixes and
    flammable American blood
    before what’s set and silent spills

    a wind blows so the body knows
    It’s time! It’s time!
    complex and poorly understood
    with no strong directional orientation
    go to bed with the wind
    migrate anyway
    listen to your gonads
    cry at the mouth
    of the bay lamenting jubilees with
    wailing and gnashing of teeth

    i bleed off the calling-pangs of
    “What next! What Next!”
    another way of saying waste waste waste
    another way of saying
    baby dolphins dried-up on shore
    another way of saying
    gohn n git!

    *Corexit is a toxic oil dispersant which was aerially distributed into the Gulf of Mexico after the 2010 Deep Horizon oil spill.

     

    Haley Hemenway Sledge is from the Gulf South and currently lives in New York City. Her work has appeared in Nola Defender and Revisions. 

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