Shard
after Joseph Ceravolo
it’s
one thing to pull time
like taffy, America,
if maybe you had
enough sugar to form
a sweet ball, organic
and tender, but it’s another to blank and
piss and smack real
people around just to
see what we can take
until we eat us
sugared flesh from
candied bone this
unspooled ticking wild
heart the last last god
As Hunger for Melon
How close sweetness is to rot. Begging and easy to want. Leave the hard-won water of astringent rind. Hold something darker in the mouth, something so close to loss you feel it on the bone. Give honey, give wine. Fill a plate, a belly, a chalice. Let the sick light of midday collapse the tender center; let the bees get drunk and dream through the neon bulldoze of the afternoon. Spit the seeds, or swallow. Cry when swallows slice the sky. Red life, swollen, falls out.
Kate Beall (she/her) lives and writes in Colorado, nestled between the mountains and the plains. Her work has been published in FERAL: A Journal of Poetry & Art, HAD, and Words & Sports Quarterly. Find her on Twitter at @katebbeall.
south broadway press 