Ginna Luck
The Real Marathon Down In the Sadness
I want the disorderliness of animals inside and outside with the bunnies and the rats. I want the unconcept of death to suckle up around me at night like rodents in a small hole. I want to gopher scratch so dirtily and weed mute in pollen lust. I want the inside of my shoulders to rooster bristle wild to rumble wavy reflections loud all across lonely mother kisses. I want to roam so tiny in a groove of sequoia branching then fall back repeatedly into the same giant hogweed. I want to build a fur cushion. I want to feel the sort of things a herd of wild buffalo feels. If there is pain I want it to be stung with nonsensical owl cries. I want to be digging and tugging through the ultra-soft ripened breath of a wild turkey. I’m covered in television rains. I’m piercing plastic through green fumes. I spit rancid beauty products all through this pitiful language city. Find me a dead snag. I want the horned owl’s egg. I want the fattest shrubs and bushes and tiny trunks and branches. I want the gorgeous blood red little body of a poison dart frog. I want toes that can climb a small tree. My teeth will be the healers. I will never own golf equipment. My head a shimmering cocoon. My heart a slippery eel.
We Swell To Become Habitual
Our house in the woods is scratched into the rocks and the skins of the trees. Every room is a fresh, slick bulb of tired wardrobe cabinets and sofa grins. The walls painted the shades I hate the most. I stripped the curtains down. A glistening wrecked rock deranged the roof and the rows of trees and all the animals and what’s left of the flowers. Only shivers scuff the reflection swamp, and we can’t really see through the windows. A grandiose drainregret whistles in a metal drawer. There is water running somewhere. There is mold growth behind the television. Stains ruin the dark green mountains out the front door. We haven’t touched the other’s myth. We haven’t laid it out under a giant work light. There are no genuine self-breaks. No frogs with blinking throats. Nobody wants to crush the other while their standing in comfortable shoes. It’s sleep that we want. It’s sleep and mercy that we want. We ask for the peace because a slit snaps, a draincrack blister whispers. The ache booms on the womb deck and the blood discs are inflamed and plump. I drag out a meticulous boredom and sit on a depression rock. You hang crystals in the kitchen window. Nobody has a clue of the wobbly roof. The back door is gone like a cloud and the muck is out. The muck is on its little walk. Here kitty, here kitty, kitty, kitty. Someone two blocks away spots the muck passing through us, our garden and the dark of the side yard. Our neighbors stack some rocks across our driveway. You make yourself some soup. I set the lamp beside your torn neck because something’s bled. Something is bleeding. The draingiant is leaking over the raw edge. The undergrowth is always stroking my hair.
Ginna Luck is a writer, teacher and aspiring visual artist. She is the author of Everything Has Been Asking For Mercy (Finishing Line Press, 2020). Her poems have been published in Radar Poetry, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Hermeneutic Chaos Journal, and others. She lives in Seattle, WA.