Synaesthesia Magazine Eat | Page 37

Beets Kristin Zimet / My cottage window scarred with frost is thin as powdered milk that fills a glass; but not my see-through Magda, burying her hunger in my skirt. She won’t hold her rag baby up to the weak light, to watch the blank shred into snow. She wants back in, more than lap deep, where the root twisted and pulsed between us. I long for my own breast tight to bursting, her tongue’s tug, the hot flood in answer. For a year I was earth enough to feed on. Leaning over her in a half arch that aches my back, I scrub the mud off these poor rat-tailed knobs from the root cellar. Ground is a sealed coffin, and we sleep cold. Beets must pull us through Kristin Zimet is the editor of The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review and the author of a full-length poetry collection, Take in My Arms the Dark. Her poems are in Poet Lore, Salt Hill, Natural Bridge and many other journals. She performs poetry in places from concert hall to arboretum. With a coarse brush, I rouse their sleeping heat. Yevgeny rubbed me so, my skin raw with blood, his cheeks ruddy with drink and pushing. Then I could not wash him off. Brown water flushes pink, splashes purple.