This selection, chosen by guest editor L.M. Cole, is from Animal Unfit by Megan Nichols (Belle Point Press 2023).
Outside, in the Bright Light
we practice harm. Bloodletting
from peeled scabs. Exorcising weakness.
Bramble scratches, horsefly bite, scraped knees,
twisted ankle, dirt in your eye, wasp sting.
Fall a thousand more times. Collide
with the earth’s heavy truth, collide
until you ache with knowing
all that is unavoidable.
Outside, in the bright light
your fatherlessness is unrecognizable.
Here you are a child of the sun.
Can I really raise you on rainwater,
mudpies? Sometimes your wildness
looks like it could consume us,
honeysuckle overtaking a forest.
How could I be the one to cut you
into a carpet-soft lawn, forever
green and tidy, awaiting fake flamingos
and other lifeless charms? I’ll risk
complete obliteration to keep
the sweetness. So creep
like a vine or erupt like an August bloom.
I can be your trellis, at best.
Megan Nichols lives in the Arkansas Ozarks. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Iron Horse Literary Review, The Threepenny Review, Frontier Poetry and elsewhere. She was a finalist for Write Bloody’s 2021 Jack McCarthy Book Prize, named a Spring 2022 Brooklyn Poets Fellow, and serves as a poetry reader for Variant Literature and River Mouth Review.
L.M. Cole is a poet and artist residing in North Carolina. She is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Bulb Culture Collective whose writing and art have been published with The Pinch Journal, The McNeese Review, Five South, The Dodge, and many other excellent journals and magazines. She can be found on Twitter @_scoops__ and more of her work can be found at linktr.ee/lmcole 
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