Female twins, black-haired, arm in arm, like blind newborn
werewolves, identically addicted to meth,
disembark the plane
in St. Louis, walk into our square of terminal, so craven in eye
and mouth that we collectively believe
that when the moon
blocked our planet’s star for 160 seconds, fur began to sprout
between their talons, behind their knees,
spreading like poisonous
mushrooms, only to recede when cicadas stopped singing, when
sparrows fell from trees like petrified
bones, more arachnid
than mammal, they twist their cracked lips into utterings that only
the other twin can decipher,
and then only with
the aid of potions brewed from fresh anteater blood. Unmoved
by visible magic, we return one-by one
to our screens, like sedated
vultures waiting for someone to die in front of us, bubonic plague,
rabies, salmonella, something
riddled with bullets
and primary colors that we can photograph and share with our high
school classmates whose skin we
haven’t touched
in years or our online food-addiction support group as we browse
through 81 recipes for heavenly hash,
while eclipse stragglers
with souvenir tattoos and mildly damaged retinas scream obscenities
at their precocious children
who are using a gift
shop magnifying glass to aim the sun’s holy rays onto unattended
babies to see if they will
burst into ash.
Beth Gordon is a writer who has been landlocked in St. Louis, Missouri for 16 years but dreams of oceans, daily. Her work has recently appeared in Into the Void, Quail Bell,Calamus Journal, By&By, Five:2:One, Barzakh, and others. She can be found on Twitter @bethgordonpoet.
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