What Howls Beneath

There is the body, and there is the dread. The vowels will come later
to flesh this skeletal being. But for now, these dissonant bones
where once mountains rose to greet me. They call for clay, 

I give them honeysuckle, tongue-touch
of fleeting sweetness. I give them berries, the last of summer’s spent sugar.
My gifts rejected by the body 

that seeks the crumbled limestone, the seeping crevice,
the white oak burst on the ground. I have no words
to speak to this body, no way to bridge the clear-cut wasteland 

or silence the chainsaw buzz. The dread animates, unveined.
The paths already set. I am plateau, hemmed by consonant forest
and pleading to be cut loose. To rend my chest  

on gnarled roots, scratch through to the howling
underneath. Because only the shattered
can tell this story. Call this a love 

for vultures circling.
Call this what it is—
a love for crashing limbs. 

The End, And Then…

Not everything will be beautiful but I hoped
some of it could be. We, who have fledged a thousand arms
and watched without awe when the firmament
erupted and the earth bellowed, we who projectile
through this hailstorm of our own creation—
Will any of us ask of you

whose small body did you shield
when yours fell? Whose blood
commingled with your own, a star-
dropped sigil that spread and opened
the sky? The rose I left for you withers
on our nightstand, its husk scattered 

like a gash on the floor.
The sun peels free
from its golden cloak
and somewhere
in the dark skywater of our never-farewell,
the petals of your fingers turn blue. 

—Ingrid L. Taylor

In our ECO LIT series, Red Canary Magazine dedicates space for established writers and emerging voices to imagine better ways of being.