Poetry by Madisen Gummer
To Love More than a Forest
for SJ
When sunlight swept in low and flirted through ferns
I didn’t know what to do with myself, convinced
if I had cells with rigid walls, I could be there better.
Like those ferns, the wind would tilt me, but I’d tilt back.
Well-versed in gravity, and not the pressure
from water’s inverse journey, my bones fall.
All I wanted, once, was to sip the sun
through a straw, to throw my body down
crunch leaves with my teeth, bone to bone–
what does one do with want? What to do
now, when I look at you, and you look at me
and I become less dense than light?
Yes, saliva webbed between my lips
dehydrated in the forest, but again
off your lips under lamplight,
in your elevator, past every clock
whose hands can only point to
I miss you or I’m with you.
Roadkill
The sisters counted the dead
animals on the side of the road.
The two lanes that ran between i-35
and their grandparents’ small town,
no different than the lines on their palms–
evidence of how they’ve bent.
The sisters tally-marked
deer, raccoons, opossums, armadillos,
and on unlucky stretches between stop signs,
skunks, whose stench outlasted their lives.
A separate count for those with intestines
unraveled into obscurity, all pink.
The girls grieved nothing
outside the occasional dog.
Foreheads to the window,
they kept an eye out for the once-living.
A habit difficult to break.
Stare at an object long enough,
when you try to rest, you’ll see it
outlined on the inside of your eyelids.
Madisen Gummer is a poet from Texas currently living in Brooklyn, New York. She holds an MFA in Writing from Sarah Lawrence College, and a BA in English from Texas State University. Their poems have appeared in Sundog Lit, Bodega Mag, Santa Clara Review, Variant Literature, and elsewhere. She works at a bookstore in Manhattan, and is also the Poetry Editor at Pigeon Pages Literary Journal.
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