It wasn’t so much the incessant
noise of a million claws on the sheetrock
that surprised me as the heat
they all put off; touching
the wall, their ermineshine glowed through,
the mean of a myriad squirmy metabolisms
burning through their weasel-chow, rumbling
between wall studs, funking out their musk up
and over the acoustic tile, until I considered
their futures there, the complex logistics
of tooth and terror, whisker and weasel-wail
it would take to, finally, weave them home.
writes mainly about skunks with occasional forays into everything else. He lives in Wichita, Kansas, teaches at Hutchinson Community College, and has published EastWesterly Review, an online journal of literature and satire, since 1999. His poetry has appeared in Chelsea, Denver Quarterly, and New Orleans Review, and has been anthologized in Troubles Swapped for Something Fresh. His prose has appeared at Mad In America, and his chapbook, Of Grace’s Resounding Caws, was published by Knotted Road Press in 2018.
