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Inevitable
I know this already: The body
will leave me someday. In fact
it has already begun to seek
another animal: Wolfhound,
bear, tiger, lemur—something
with more teeth, muscles, mandible
in which to inhabit its hunger for flesh
already my bones have gone soft.
The body reports its sharp complaints
in Morse Code: Each dot-dash-dot
representing a unit of warning
gone wrong in the circulation; then
a rip, roar, tearing along
the hardened arteries.
It's true I have abused the body,
left it wandering in the rain and snow
too long, sutured the mouth against
howling. I have sacrificed it to the gods
who sucked salt from the plexus.
Now faint scars and marks remain: One runs
the side of my hip; another, beneath
the thorax. When all that mattered then
were the cries of entry and plunder, I
spurned signs of those black moles,
their tentacles growing like fiddleheads.
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Mia resides in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where she edits the online magazine, Tryst. Her work can be found in Ocho 27, Ocho 29, Quiet Mountain Essays, and in the March 2010 Issue of Poets and Artists.