Tiny Gills

Photo by Brad Helmink on Unsplash

Tiny Gills

Feel your neck pulse open 
with slits of oxygen bubbling through.

So much buckling, turning that you spot in the attic corner 
a goat carved at the foot of a three-eyed shepherd 
on the sarcophagus. 
                                Final resting place for the god 
of planning.  You sigh, letting go the world 
held since childhood,

Katherine Soniat's eighth collection of poems—Polishing the Glass Storm—will be published by LSU Press in 2022. Bright Stranger was published in 2016 by that same press. The Goodbye Animals was awarded the 2014 Turtle Island Chapbook Award. A Shared Life won the Iowa Poetry Prize and The Swing Girl (LSU Press) was selected as Best Collection of 2011 by the North Carolina Poetry Council. Her poems have appeared in the Denver Quarterly, Women's Review of Books, Iowa Review, Poetry, Superstition Review, and The Nation, among others. Visit her at http://www.katherinesoniat.com

(c) 2021 Katherine Soniat