Where Feet Go
Caleb Nelson
All these years of silence, a ribbon
on my tongue. Someone is lying
face down in the rain and again
I am not a cauliflower. I am not
a curse, not a bag of tricks.
Everyone is so creative. My job
is to make sure you don't see me. At night,
I clean dinosaur bones with a wooden toothbrush,
wrap orange garlands around them, stack them
under my bed, for luck. Everyone is so beautiful
and everything is so funny and love is a microscope,
a tiny altar of raptor teeth, my mutilated sister riding
in a sinking boat. With all this satin in my mouth, it’s
hard to talk.
Caleb Nelson is a poet living in the upper peninsula of Michigan. He is a Master of Fine Arts Poetry Candidate at Northern Michigan University, and Associate Poetry Editor of Passages North. His work has appeared in or is forthcoming in Crab Fat Literary Magazine, Stoneboat, Prick of the Spindle, Red Savina Review, Storm Cellar, and Cardinal Sins.