The Last of Him
When floods rose, the tree branches thinned,
carrying nothing but menses. Barren, deficient
of the most precious of metals, I walk the path
my mother plows through, tearing at tinsel on my body.
There is never a clearing; the path encircles the darkest woodland
where everything is either pregnant or rotting, asleep.
New-age medicine says this is where to come for healing,
but instead, the bark, cracking, showed my future—
how to run while looking back, everything certain as blood.
