CALAMITY
AND NOW, HOW ALL
[our speech deteriorates]
In the treespine
a whittle of bark
exhumes anttrains,
mandibles clickclick
under breezebreath.
Unanswered shadings
fill cavityrings, knots,
out to its fingerings,
where leaves
silkslip down
to the fermenting earth.
And what of the human
body? Not much
more than sistershavings,
a vertebrae of
laughlight:
absence, half sense,
a pennythought
under-tongued.
So much for that
cove crisscrossed
with splinters. A whistling.
Exhaled echoes spill
through limblinks,
unaccountably.
Felled: the trickslipped
trunk mayhems to piles
of its peripherals,
a sentence’s sap and bast
hangs in switchnots:
a noose.
Abi Pollokoff is a Seattle-based writer with work previously in Inch, Broadsided Press, LEVELER, inter/rupture, Guernica, H_NGM_N, and others. A former editor-in-chief of the Tulane Review, she won the 2012 Anselle M. Larson/Academy of American Poets prize for Tulane University and holds an MFA from the University of Washington.