by Lena Ziegler
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Find you murky inside my skin rattling loose splinters from my tongue a rot within this ghost breathing through the letters of your face a name that rhymes sweet forgiveness & I sense a tingle in your brain a tickle asking for the cure you’ve been the wild burn of forest the sticky haunting of a man I asked only once to fuck me rabid but in my dreams I am just a seeping hole I am continuous darkness I am treacherous want oh your bones construct language only when I’m listening your bones poke holes in skin & I want only to swallow the spittle of a love so thick it chokes us both to death I want only the chafe of bodies rubbed raw on the grit of tongue and human dread have you noticed shadows in the dark trench of my thigh the way light never shines in a gulf so deep the way the end of things means winter & ninety degrees of animal hunger the way a good mouth can wreck a life I asked only once for a man to trouble my insides spew anatomy from his teeth I asked only once for a man only once for him to know the quake of a heart rattled raw from lack oh to birth a howl straight from these lips a dripping screech of moonlight & famine I am the feral scent of my own ruptured throat the quiet savage dying in your sleep but how those bones of yours will blossom ruby pink how those bones fragment oh how they.
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Lena Ziegler
Lena Ziegler is the author of MASH (The A3 Press) and editor and co-founder of The Hunger. She was a finalist in the Autumn House Press 2018 Fiction contest and the 2017 Goldline Press Non-fiction contest. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Indiana Review, Split Lip Magazine, Dream Pop Press, Yes, Poetry, The Seventh Wave, Gambling the Aisle, Literary Orphans, The Flexible Persona, Anti-Heroin Chic, and others. She holds an MFA from Western Kentucky University and is pursuing her Ph.D. at Bowling Green State University.
Artist: Juliette Gallas