I Am the Prairie Dog Flattened

a whisper a toenail scrape a rusted cough and a sneeze

dead dead dead alive only under the floorboards pound beat and hum hummm and brraa and everything that is us is here and everything that ever was is here

I walk through trees stripped of what makes them beautiful. I miss the bergamot that lined the strewn gravel, the hard-packed clay of the house no one could live in. That building, looming, long and barren for all its clutter. I miss the lemonbalm. I miss the catnip. I miss, I yearn, I pine and yet I feel

like rusted steel made of years and weathered wood and thrift store carpet threadbare eaten by indian meal moths chewed by dogs and pissed on by the same I'm here I'm in the floorboards and that's all it's ever been that's all it will be dust bones and flesh still clinging hair that reminds you of a day of sun and clouds and exactly like any other day

I remember when I was a cat. I remember living as a hawk, a dragon a wolf I remember the fragrant sharp sweet sick rotting scent of living of fucking and breeding and laying eggs and dying and nursing and running across the plains and tearing into flesh warm slippery wet strings and tendons and cartilage and bone and taking and eating and tasting the world in all its glory and horror

This apartment is not a home. The birds hardly deign to perch here. A pigeon, once. My heart lifted yesterday--a songbird came. The neighbor's weathervane. A house not three feet from the door. A strip of green riddled with dogshit. Water from the pipes collects in mud. Moss grows. Slugs have taken over the local fauna.

and I can remember lying prostrate packed-in dirt caked earth curled fetal remember my death and every agonizing moment and every other death and the soundless scream that doesn't end while i waited waited waited for the void to squeeze around me and purge me through to the eye of my god the horned old green god of hooves and antler tips and spits

Born again. Stardust won't keep me. Rather I'd drift. Eons. Until the world turns again. Until the old ones roam its plains. Until I can be.