by Teresa K. Miller

I don’t listen for you now, your crow step,
so eager to say my own piece. How does it

start. The ants came to tear my house down.
I went to bed thinking of them, woke plotting

against them. I did not dream. A legion of men
that summer, none could bear to let me

speak. They focused over my shoulder,
the vacant corner a more willing

conspirator. Where will I lay you, wright,
smith, climber cutting to the node, choosing

a new leader.

***

Lured back, I spun myself a shiny aluminum wing—

but in the afternoon, she put on a new face.
Those you love will evaporate before you, leave

their slack-jawed wind-up bodies lying in the yard.
Nicotine-stained filters reeking in the kitchen garbage.

Here is the next moment of your life: You spent it
in my crooked song.

______________________________________________________________________

Teresa K. Miller’s second full-length poetry collection, Borderline Fortune (Penguin, Oct. 5, 2021), was selected as a winner of the 2020 National Poetry Series by former California poet laureate Carol Muske-Dukes. A graduate of Barnard College and the Mills College MFA program, Miller is the author of sped (Sidebrow) and Forever No Lo (Tarpaulin Sky) as well as co-editor of Food First: Selected Writings from 40 Years of Movement Building (Food First Books). Her poems and essays have appeared in ZYZZYVA, AlterNet, Entropy, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere. Originally from Seattle, she tends a mini orchard near Portland, Oregon.