Smithereens Press Chapbooks SP8- Dordéan, do Chroí - A Hummingbird, your Heart | Page 35

Hagfish
"Women who love to write poetry are the hagfish of the world. We eat
everything. We eat the language. We eat experience. We eat other
people’s poems." – Ruth Stone

Aloof and uncivil, living fossils,
ancient snake sisters of the Delphic Sybil,
we spend lifetimes apart.
We devour rotting remains,
we scavenge on the strange,
stripping morsels of consonants
from crumbling corpses.
In ocean shadows,
we exhume and consume
stolen syllables.
We gulp black moons.
See us lie, gloating in the gloom,
spinning rhymes from swirls of slime.

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