by Meghan Kemp-Gee
It is like in a folk
tale where talking birds talk to talking mice,
where one is lazy and
one is wise, one reads the signs while one dreams
away their greed, laps and
gobbles summer mornings, where one is where
talking meets animal
understanding, talking animals meet
understanding, talking and
understanding meet like in the brittle
blades between two wings, where
a foot meets crunching vertebrae, both talk,
no one sings. One is your
throwaway body. No one talks of glass
claws like shards, of scratching
out penultimate hard-pitched cuts before
they drive in a row through
the wall. It’s like they’re late, the way they run.
Meghan Kemp-Gee is the author of THE ANIMAL IN THE ROOM (2023) and WHAT I MEANT TO ASK: A CHAPBOOK (2022). She also co-created CONTESTED STRIP, the world’s best comic about ultimate frisbee (and soon to be a graphic novel, ONE MORE YEAR).
Emerge Literary Journal 