by Susan Grimm

Cut the string of attention or chew it until everything
sharp is flat. Everywhere the feathers scratching

under your clothes so that only endings seem good.
Like that time at the beach when the flies were biting

only you. Who would gauze over that—the water
fletched like dragon skin or is that your own granulated

hide. Twitching your hand down the long sleeve
believing you have to be barbed. How else to deflect

uneasy tingling, minute incessant nerve cry. It’s not
Charon at the end, but your whole life a ferry boat ride.

Skiff, Styx. The wind driving down. The shale-sheet sky.

Susan Grimm has been published in Sugar House Review, The Cincinnati Review, Phoebe, and Field. Her chapbook Almost Home was published in 1997. In 2004, BkMk Press published Lake Erie Blue, a full-length collection. In 2010, she won the inaugural Copper Nickel Poetry Prize. In 2011, she won the Hayden Carruth Poetry Prize and her chapbook Roughed Up by the Sun’s Mothering Tongue was published. In 2022, she received her third Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Grant. Susan is on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/susan.grimm.5/),  Twitter (@sjgrimm), and Instagaram (grimm217).