By which a man possesses or enters silence. Sometimes to be a hunter to language, his animal loneliness a blood ivy, sentient & oracular & a stalk’s clean break, soft and audible. Sequestered in water, attended but also severed, aroused. Heady as droplets on moss after drought, a man squeezes an abscess to destroy the magic of its center just as he propagates the plant. Done with the hands, it’s a vein through which a gunshot hammers sound through quiet cedar.

But enough from a river’s tantrum. Extension in human rain. Mellow bites accrue a tinsel headache & at it she’s a fist, a clever arrangement of eating where the crick floats material dimpled & pocked. Anger winces into the scene a headache. Weathered as Audubon Field Guides. The foreground flashlights I and objects into the weather, into the field, breathing, eating liquid ivy in a terrine of stars. Come from the dirt, an ass fears nature & eats as much as an ass blushes. One must look away.


Ally Harris is the author of three chapbooks of poetry, Dispersal (The Song Cave, 2019), Her Twin Was After Me (Slim Princess Holdings, 2014) and floor baby (dancing girl press, 2011). She graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop with an MFA in Poetry and has had poems appear in Denver Quarterly, Bennington Review, BOAAT Press, Tarpaulin Sky, The Volta, and more. She was a recent recipient of a Regional Arts & Culture Council Grant for her project Submission Reading Series, based out of Portland, OR.