Cauldron Anthology Issue 4: Seasons Cauldron Anthology - Seasons | Page 42

Flower Moon (Milk) Jesse Rice-Evans Previously published in White Stag The first time I lost you to sea-scrim, I wailed once then faded, bed-ghost, hands full of myself. Later, I learned to loosen, peel, curl, speckle— fog of things unknowable. Drape your heels in the road, read from my book under Scorpio moon, wash of street lamp. Think about the time they came overdressed to a party, leaned on the bookshelf and told a story about graveyards; about unexpected gnaw of frost after a sunny afternoon; how they were optimistic in just a sweater; about you, genderless in jeans, how wet you got from brick walls, the way they stacked poems, smell of sun & lilac. Uncontainable flood all over everything. I was never taught to girl—even my name, scrubbed of gender, bound to celebrity, reveals some lack, some shade. My twirl of hip and round shouldering shrug refuse androgyny—too much flesh in soft/wrong places. In third-wave thinking, corpulence can still do drag. But I cannot bring myself to stuff into blazers bursting with tit. Cardinals’ trills, grasshopper-whistle, each leaf piling against rough evening breeze—it is already May, but your collar is still high. You verb: neutralize, osmose, swish. If memory is seasonal, you are summer in a library, door ajar for first hot day, lawn-sprawl on the last, dew soaking jeans. Verbs move me—they twirl and melt as I tongue them around, each a slick candy mak- ing nouns shiver with purpose— I pulse my chair closer, resist each heuristic impulse: 42 Cauldron Anthology