Poetry by Haley Davis

                   i wen† lef† CC



Sunday Morning
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Copper veins throb behind the bathroom wall 
                 and pound a quarter-sized hole                     in my forehead’s middle. 
The Home does this out of love, it seems, the free cranial carving. 
I press a thumb in, scraped and kissed by bone and brain-goo, 
suck the head-pie filling from my nail and stumble down its stairs, 
                                                                                                    scatter light and cats across the linoleum I picked for myself.

Wall pulse shudders the living room, 
                  stigmatas another hole through my palm     when I drag fingers on its drywall. 

Wound me enough to keep me inside The Home
searching for a needle and thread, superglue, and staple gun. 

I think this space is mine, mine to with what I please,
but occupancy does not equal ownership                   or domination over dominion. 

                                                                                                                                               It is easier than you think to build a trap
                                                                                                                                                                  that you will catch yourself in.

The Home pins me to our dining table                          like an exotic moth found dead on the doorstep, 
tips the wood with ease to pull me up
onto the mantle and burrows slow in my spine.


The Home does me like so many homekeepers/wreckers before,
                                                                                                                                                                    forwarded to new addresses.



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It’s Normal to Fear the Ocean


I tell myself, considering the plummet
into the cordierite waves twenty feet below.
Fully clothed, plus wallet and phone,
I don’t move, of course I don’t—except
when the wind, exquisite and violent,
pulls me against splintered railing
and whips my hair into my eyes.
For that blind moment, I’m airborne,
but my grippy yellow sneakers still pinch the wood.

In that choppy second of darkness, 
I miss the dolphin a pier-stranger spots.

             Did you see that?  he asks. 
                   Tell me you saw that too.

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Haley Davis is a poet and occasional writer of other things from Arizona. Her writing concerns gender, apocalypse, nature, and how awesome and beautiful it is to be queer. Some of this work can be found in QA Poetry, Boshemia Magazine, The Tunnels, and Arizona’s Best Emerging Poets: An Anthology. You can find Haley on Twitter: @haleythepoet