All in by Samantha Duncan

by Samantha Duncan


into swaddled narrative
tendon stretch, neuron-wide fall.

My garish cartoon life-gap
caulked your bones with milk

and drowned my landscape,
made of decades
a simple cutout smile.

Disappearing is an easy
stake in the ground, but here,

hunger doesn’t have to know
a mouth. May your character

awaken in a few years,
quench me with clay or ash
or blood. Meanwhile, I fold

my bones into their most
welcoming meridians,

where everything’s expectant:
mother, waiting, void.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Samantha Duncan is the author of four poetry chapbooks, including Playing One on TV (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2018) and The Birth Creatures (Agape Editions, 2016). Her work has recently appeared in BOAAT, decomP, Kissing Dynamite, Meridian, and The Pinch. She is an Assistant Editor for Borderlands: Texas Poetry Journal and lives in Houston.