hovering allegiance, blanket seed.
by shannon baker

the icy olive of her smooth eye (and certainly the thieving gleam of slender tooth-row) persuaded, with slack & narrow discourse, his temper toward a single curve and, leaning all directions, as the wind often did before the humans stacked their buildings up too close to the sky, he wove his face (all smoke & sewing needles) in and out of the coolness of her dry and greening forearms which leaked the keen perceptive needs of one who has been long restraining the heavy gulp of uninvited mother-wantings which pull and only pull and only pull apart the ticklish tape of bundled vein-strings so faithfully bound by the personal youthing magnet. and she is again made too suddenly aware of her (low, orange, bell-shaped) empty growl of womb. he crosses the room as though there were not endless leaves and pages floating between them on hot waves of colliding exhale.

she shuts her face against his increase, picturing the ruined corpses of the children’s crusade and the animals who cleaned greedily that flesh from bloody grasses. she then dutifully punctures the valley of her palm with a favorite fingernail. he would not notice this hole until two nighttimes later, while she slept without warning, stretched full out on the east-facing porch, as though the itching stars had dropped her limbs there (happily) one at a time. she lay all alone but for the bulging ashtray which knelt at her hip-place to kiss and trace and buzz against sweat lines softly, shaking the skin so that it shines flat against the bone, and to tie together all at once the loose bits that produce the wild coughing whine which sends her ovaries doubling over themselves in a beg beg begging confession (and she will open up her long mouth at first light / causing / the tiniest silverglass orgasm.) all of this he does not do. and she wakes without stirring. there is no way of telling whether he has noticed. she is motionless. her ghost-like breathing diminishes until every organ has ceased its struggle and slipped asleep. all of them silenced. every one except her heart. she listens. her heart listens. he does not seize her.