Kathy Z. Price

This October Morning

I sat outside with a cup of coffee, one tree turns red, moon struck of green, humming like a tuned fork, endless hours, wake, last night’s dress sticking to my body, a horror television movie is on, music swells

soon all skeins of leaves shed, turn yellow, an onomatopoeia of goldenrod, once my man whispered the word joy in hebrew as I lay close, circumcised, tawny and snow-flecked limbs twined

skin-skin, discern every tributary and blood line and he whispered, I want to roll in leaves with you, before he left me for a woman raised from the daughters of olive trees, her figs

you are not wondering, once clasped me to you deeper than you are far away, burn africa on a wooden roulette wheel, then harlem: reject her rising Apollo.  Look,

--a deer sitting across from me among the brown woods and dark leaves, its eyes tentative and then, trusting as it turned its head into a light sleep, spirit of the animal burrows into what is left of sunlight.

This morning, a propane truck, unfurled the canvas hose to pump in fuel, to warm the house, invite the mice that swim like embryo, on their sides in the toilet and macramé spiderwebs wrapping the leg of a fly

to alert the snake, miring in the basement, shedding gray metallic medallions,

I can do that too, release my scales, snake and

I have learned warmth does not have to be skin to skin;

it can be manufactured.

Bio

Kathy Z. Price is a recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry. She's also a Hedgebrook and Edward Albee Fellow, a recipient of Archie & Bertha Walker Poetry Fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center Provincetown. Recent work was published by storySouth, and more work is included or forthcoming in TriQuarterly, Rumpus, Cincinnati Review, Bayou, Pleiades, and Prairie Schooner among others. Find her at kathyzprice.com.

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