by Elisabeth Horan
Something there is that wants to eat me –
wants to eat me alive.
He is the thing with yellow eyes
and I’m never safe for there are no doors,
There are no locks on hemlocks.
Some get the pleasure of being eaten dead.
Never feel his jaws crush their head –
There is a thing called a human –
And he likes his food
this way: shiny, clean, blood-free.
It rarely looks like meat, rather of play food,
for a play kitchen, at a play table, with no
Dead animals sitting ‘round it – for the ladies’
lunch party of white gloves and crumpets.
Something there is within me knows
being eaten alive is better than being eaten dead –
But I can’t remember what that is.
Death is only the thing that comes
After being alive. Feared for not
yet having shook hands with it,
Nor peered into its yellow eyes.
Yet I’ll meet him there – when my turn comes;
Invite his silky fangs –
with my open, lucid, rods and cones –
Never the type of glass-blown orbs:
gentle, genial tricks of the taxidermist.
Elisabeth Horan is a poet mother student lover of kind people and animals, homesteading in Vermont with her tolerant partner and two young sons. She hopes the earth can withstand us and that humans may learn to be more kind to each other and to Mother Nature.
She has work upcoming at formercactus, Writers Resist, The Cerurove and Mohave Heart. Her chapbook “Pensacola Girls” comes to life from Bone & Ink Press this September.
Elisabeth is a 2018 MFA Candidate at Lindenwood University and teaches at River Valley Community College in New Hampshire.
Follow her @ehoranpoet / ehoranpoet.com
(And don’t miss Elisabeth’s poem Elephants Never Let Their Loved Ones Die Alone. – Elephants Never)