To Keep Our Mouths So Sweetly Fed
It’s dusk before I risk words,
their pinked softness, rosy
aromas, and though night brings
velvet, more flowers under anemic sky,
my verbs flatten to moony grayscale, color
washed from my lips like a river’s wet heap.
I pace to make my body mean something.
Press flushed skin against anything
cool, try to layer reserve
over newly threshed injury.
I know I risk more than words with you.
More than saying the thing I mean.
But I won’t be stolen away
by my body’s restless questioning,
the way she mounts a statement
with fervor, then curls her mouth
at the edges of it. Here, across our shared
pastoral, her dark meadow hints at safety,
yet treeline glints with so many eyes, lit
like paired forges, like felled stars,
by which to fabricate an answer.
Night makes you believe I’m past the hurt.
Night makes animals of us both.
After, a slant hymn unfurls,
foxglove and oleander
at the tip of my tongue
Lynn Thayer (she/her) is a multidisciplinary artist living with chronic disability in Colorado. Her work has appeared in ‘Santa Clara Review’, ‘Bicoastal Review’, ‘Wild Roof Journal’, and ‘Tendon Magazine’ among others. Her first chapbook, ‘The Augury’, was a finalist for Cathexis Northwest Press’s Unpublished Author Contest in 2025.