by Nora Ray

you treasure olfaction when
your eyes stop working,
drizzle exudes the fragrance of brothy earth,
deluge smells of centipedes

i am alone on this hill: my only salvation
from the water murdering the phlox,
its petals loose and overwhelmed;
it has been raining for half my age

the ivy’s rotten, the roots, the herbs
my knees are too, disfigured joints;
i need to run, upward, skyward
to the headwaters of the rain

my mother is long gone, below;
the phlox is too, it rots in my stomach,
that dark acidic land—poor phlox,
first killed by nature, then by its child

like those grasshopers i live on,
dragonflies, roaches, and ants
there are few left: two beetles and a wasp;
i’m filled with them, i am a cannibal

my new mother is a centipede,
she covers me, her body flat and cold;
her buzzing lulls me to sleep
i am inside the egg, i am the egg

please, mother, please, bequeath me legs
more legs, more legs, more legs to run;
to run skyward, to the headwaters
so i can turn that torrent off

i wake up to a fossilized mass,
a puddle of dark, acidic land
revived grasshoppers, perforated knees;
she takes them away, her legs are strong

mine are too, all two hundred and nine,
they glide like waves, black tides
against the puddle, now it’s lake;
but there is no sky, there’s only rain

Nora Ray’s fiction appeared in MoonPark Review, Twin Bird Review, Ergot, Propagule, Seize The Press and elsewhere. Her poems appeared in Frigg and Apocalypse Confidential. She’s a poetry and fiction reader at Cosmic Daffodil. She lives in Spain. You can find her on Twitter/Bluesky: @noraraywrites.