CW: none.
I.
Simple, tiny blood-cuts on a calf.
She cut herself shaving. The wind whipped
weasel-clawed, in circles around her legs.
The wind tasted of blood that day, or shrieked
like weasels finally let out to play,
tails creating a tornado inside the imagination:
what price, small flecks of blood.
What simplicity: open mouths from each cut, singing.
Who has need of eyes when one can find food
endlessly, endlessly in the skin of the wind.
We call these yokai weasels, kamaitachi.
But they eat us with the stomachs of far larger beasts.
II.
We marvel at the sea maw swallowing battleships.
We dive headfirst into the river mouth of water
that coos over our bodies, slimes them with algae.
Nothing claws us with hands or fingernails,
only the endless spiral of need. Some loves
need to destroy before they may plant.
III.
Where the hair parts. Isn’t that what all men seek?
There is a secret mouth at the base of my skull
That asks over and over again about
You.
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Betsy Aoki
Betsy Aoki is a poet and speculative fiction writer whose work has been published in Strange Horizons, Uncanny Magazine, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Fantasy Magazine, The Deadlands and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. She is currently Poetry Editor for the Hugo Award-winning Uncanny Magazine.
Aoki’s debut poetry collection about women in technology, Breakpoint, was a National Poetry Series Finalist. Its signature poem, “Slouching like a velvet rope,” was selected by Pulitzer Prize winner Jericho Brown for the Auburn Witness Poetry Prize.
