I Confess
I’ve resorted to murder,
here in my kitchen
filled with basil, bee balm
and thronging castes of blue-black crawlies—
insular troops, tiny mighty, committed
to a crisscross of skewed geography,
my countertop the pinnacle
of misguided missions.
No matter how often we skirmished—
vinegar, garlic, ginger root,
hot pepper sauce strategically smeared,
they marched, an endless cadence, bodies
immune to TikTok’s tender of panaceas.
Thus, my about-face
to warning labels, skull and crossbones,
the safety-sealed containers,
their catalog of wards and palladia.
Afterwards, past the gnarled pyre
of exoskeletons, I became
a Steinbeck character—struggling and sullen,
too broken by my own hand
to conjure a defense.
What humans cannot tame, they terrorize,
forgetting and forgetting and forgetting,
when we bring in the cold,
darkness follows.
This Week, the Drought
On this land where creek beds
splinter and crack,
squirrels are skeletons lugging fur,
the deer pale as papery birch.
Hornets hover, plummet,
bounce off hard ground,
birds kilter like ashes.
I walk out into another scalding dawn
where, overnight, a mast of acorns,
freed from shriveled stalks,
scattered themselves like mana
far as my eye can see.
Squirrel and deer stand side-by-side,
heads bowed, relishing.
Birds balance branches, salivate
the chance of leftover crumbs.
A watering bucket in hand,
I suffer myself to hope.
—
“This Week, the Drought” was originally published in Women Speak, Volume Ten
Because They Grow and Go
Behind the glass their faces,
sun brown, summer gold,
cheeks cheesing for the camera,
their long vowel vined in wild root
and friends forever—
their smiles incantatious.
See how unencumbered they lean,
unsavvy to nature’s duplicity,
the way fate conjures cockups,
time hoodwinks memory.
Beyond the frame
crows cackle, squirrels skitter,
a red fox struts a tango,
sniffs the air for safety.
Leafhopper greens and pokeberry purples
speckle this patch of land
where absence tolls and two girls
became way-seeds
carried off by irascible winds.
I squeeze their likeness
to my wishbone.
If they were here
we’d hoodang like forest faeries
arms crisscrossed in light.
*
Kari Gunter-Seymour’s latest poetry collection, Dirt Songs (2024), was published by Eastover Press and is available here.
Learn more about Kari. on our Contributors’ Page.
(Photo: Sancho McCann/flickr.com/ CC BY 2.0)
- I Confess and Other Poems by Kari Gunter-Seymour - February 13, 2025
- Child of the Large-Beaked Bird by Kari Gunter-Seymour - November 9, 2024
- Granny Medicine by Kari Gunter-Seymour - May 8, 2024