“Is it time yet?” I ask?
“shush,” you say
and push my face into the muddy earth.
nose and mouth pressing
into the wet, cold blackness,
smooth and dark.
But sucking up earth doesn’t
leave much of any sense for
poetry, or the smell of
bread baking.
There is always more earth
to be sucked up.
the gritty suffocation,
like a face stuffed full of chocolate icing
that long ago gave up its sweetness.
You can drown of it, and who would care?
except, perhaps, the poem that dies inside you,
half-ripe, rotting on the vine,
decaying into the earth that is your flesh—–
your failure to speak
poisoning its own small planet.
Beth Firestein