Lily Sampson
Colorado State University
walking stilted: cupping and gripped
i tried to grab it but it slipped
between my butterfingers
(which the punching bag game
at the gas station told me I had)
I wanted to run
from the mud
layering layers over my brain (stuck between skull and tissue)
and disembody the worms that grew in the sickly, zero ph garden
that laches itself onto the top of my neck:
the plowed garden that pulls the strings that instructs my shoulders to tense,
that urges my chest to climb higher,
and drops the weight of my stomach until it hungers no longer.
you can’t decapitate a garden
so you lie on the dirt and heal it with your princess tears
clutching the polluted ground,
you accept that which can never be purified:
always unkempt and too keen at pacifying.
rather than mutilating the dirt
where the poison slept
you sacrifice the body as fertilizer
amalgamate with the earth.
puzzle piece of you,
maybe jagged but always attached.
sang lullabies
and left snug
in the clay
and sound
in the dust.