The alder grove stands like skinny bodies across the field
lifting bone arms and bone fingers and the small, knotted bark of knuckles.
The spiders come, hanging spectacular banners. Imagine all the words
they could spell out,
if only snatched from our mouths as we hurt on by.
We roll the windows up, accelerate past
the places we have slept
face down, catch blurred imprints of our mouths
across mounds of decaying grass. The car hasn’t crashed
but here we are in ice and the sound of asphalt,
the spiders taking up under my bra and within your mouth,
fingertipped and eight legged-
we become so close it doesn’t hurt to call you baby.
Kelly Gray is a writer and educator living in the redwoods, nine miles and seven fence posts away from the ocean. Most recently, her manuscript The Mating Calls //of a//Specter won the Tusculum Review Chapbook Prize, and her work has been featured in Cream City Review, Passages North, Lake Effect, Southern Humanities Review, Rust & Moth, Jet Fuel Review, Storm Cellar, Permafrost, and Action, Spectacle. You can find her full-length collections and chaps at writekgray.com.
Image: “The House Goes South” by Alex J. Tunney
Pine Hills Review 