The Long-Fingered Draw
How satisfying, the decisive snip through something thick.
Did you imagine it as construction paper children? Dried reeds by the river?
I want those instruments to be my home.
I want to hear the storm crack and suppose tectonic
swell when the table gives out under me and you
hold eye contact. Take three trains.
Come over and tell me I don’t need brass knuckles to kill this spider.
Tell me again.
KITCHEN SCRAP
There have been inventions
since last month. Colors,
salt craving, meat
wrapped in paper. Pine
trees do receive their tenants
and he can’t stop
sleeping, in this heat, my syphon
hand. I can’t decide.
Do I become small again,
a little boy blue?
Gild toy horses
with elephant paint
and trespass
again, against him?
LIP MONGER
Across the face of my spectator
love is a bleached strand and amateur
cast, a misplaced wrist meant to keep me
still on this dock, fish hook in neck. Sure,
I’ll pat down the accident. But if I can’t
detach, tangle harder. Spray perfume
on the sand, plant new lilies. Burst
open the bulb and render the fat.
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K.T. Billey was born and raised in ruralAlberta, Canada, and moved to New York to study poetry at Columbia University, where she is now a Teaching Fellow. Her poems have appeared in Phantom Limb, The New Orleans Review, Ghost Proposal, Prick of the Spindle, the sensation feelings journal, and H.O.W. Journal. Her translations have appeared in Palabras Errantes and she is proud to be a Girls Write Now mentor.