Ginna Luck
It’s My job
An era of lungs rot in my boots. The dead space snails around my feet like milk. It’s my job to comb through the loose blank of the poisonous catalogue. My job to swallow the difficult alterations to newer bodies moaning in the attic. My job to sweep up the spilled broken bits of the bruised upholstery. The days invert to rabbits. The bees and the ants develop a toxic, bright plastic saliva. The raccoons knot in the zero slot under the fence. It’s my job to clover through the fur. My job to scrub to the bottom of the mildewed glass beer beetle. My job to sting with the most active little bats through all the rust. I start to feel the blurriest brain. I start to develop an invisible blood. It’s my job to attach to the part of the house no human can dig through. My job to boot-scrape to the hollow center of the crawl space. There I go through the glittering hornets. There I go across the itchy place in my mind. There I go to the deep inside circular hatch, my head drowned in the habit of thinking like a hurt drum, spinning like a circle of dust out there all alone at night. It’s my job to bristle through the tiniest owl, through the babbling furnace, to the ten tongues at my neck, to the bloodlessness bleating in my ill. I come at once. I come to eek some holes, some thuds, some rabbits. It’s my job to gutter the sweeps. My job to summit the previous little hutch. My job to slurry an original beam, a blighted out beam in the attic. I mean, a bleached out beam in the skin sucks, in the fake whites, in the secret little unders, in the anyone-out-here narrow passages. In the dead bad stretch of the idiot attic, I make myself a new face. I make myself a snoozing skull. I make myself a halo of weeds. More beetles, more bats, more rabbits.
Our Fog Hearts Scramble in Total Darkness
We have rodents. There are holes in walls and tiny scratching sounds in corners and red-eyed little vermin speeding along in front of us and from within us. Bat wings are like walnut shells. We raid our brains for pinching possums. We wash out our mouths looking for where the noise comes from, where the swarming resets, where the stuttering resides, where it scales, where it hornets, where it papers a nest. We look for eggs. We recognize a part of the house expelling the atmosphere. A burst of dead moths, like match flames, are entirely too close to our eyes. Another tooth goes numb. Another dark dove swallows the rain.
Ginna Luck lives and works in Seattle with her husband and two teen boys. She teaches elementary-age kids because she is a kid at heart. Her poems sometimes get published and can be read online at various places. Her first book, Everything Has Been Asking For Mercy, came out two years ago from Finishing Line Press.