Heather Sweeney


OCCUPY THIS SPACE AS ENDANGERED POEMS RESURFACE


Occupy this space.  With endangered tools of impulse.  With fauna denied surfaces. Of red fur pastorals, and pined for instinct.  Of soul aligned with animal.  Feeling colors.  A tee shirt that says: foxy.  Coarse earth.  Expansion.  Touching the color.  A trend for foxes but not their facts.  The thought tightening.  Into a sparse wilderness.  A pebble between the teeth.  Site.  Of the endangered fox.  A palpable storm.  Gesturing in the skin.  A success marked by contrary responses. 


Shards of a forest timeline.  Echoplasm sutras: the wolf’s breath as topology.  Unfound Cycladic idols.  Within sediment of lungs.  Within a stream of the herb’s raw bone.  Manic idols with their instruments. Gristle of days.  Ground to a powder of fine hallucination.  A jagged child in a communion dress.   Ancestors, gnashing.  Moving from one sky to another.  Morrigan, the wolf.  Shreds of the dress.  Purify.  The burning dress, buried.  A ceremony.  Blue ash.  The gathering and recognition.  Animal of negative space.  Marrow of status and vision.  The paw that dug itself out.


An animal dark craving.  In meditation.  The owl, Lakshmi’s vehicle.  Endangered.  Unknown hunger.  Degrees.  The crackle of TV stars.  A criminal.  My push-ups.  My Kelly Ripa anxiety.  My Kali and my aversions.  Running with the dog.  Cut off.  A car.  A man in a Prius.  I was yelling something.  Grit and gristle. Kali coming out.  The tree trimmer stopped to listen.   The ex-gang member, petting my dog.  Making baby sounds.  Saying yes, yes.  Golden teeth between the pebbles.  Gnarled.  The earth will absorb even our deepest cuts. 


Poring.  A sparrow in sage.  Disabled origins.  Deleted rotations.  Tiger, sparrow and vulture.  Undocumented.  Extinction of senses.  Kin in fauna decibels.  Ephemeral blind spots.  A future repeating.  Etheric edges.  I cherry thick you.  You dog my petting.  Craving a dark.  Anxiety is a tiger tooth shard.  From beyond human surfaces.  A tent of seeds.  Pinned down.  In an animal lung.  Penned. Pink arrows. The color of it touching.  The sparrow. Lungs of sediment.  A heart that never stops itching. 


The color you can’t stop thinking about.  The PBS nature show.  Toucans in Peru will not come to those men calling in little boats.  Toucans, the newest pet craze.  Its bill is a honeycomb of bone.  Its bill of orange.  In little boats.  Its.  A moment of capture.  Tugging you open.  Arrowhead, a ceaseless shape.  An outline of a season.  A nametag for each bird.  This is a potential memory.