Poetry by Siân Killingsworth

                 ​Øyvind Holmstad CC



​
Ouroboros Fever


A shaking venom moves in my hours.
Time feels too long. I granulate 
my emotions, spend 
each grain, miserly.
Else be mired & consumed
by endless need.
Years heavy as a weighted blanket.
A generational
tether. Chemistry or environment--
what’s the difference? Prozac
only made me fat. Not happy. Not blank.
I turn on myself. 

Is this my place? There 
will be salvation. There 
must. My horoscope tells me to work
& be dependable.
I want flair. I want to climb
out of my body 
& put it gently into the green
can for composting. Walk away bare
& free & free of identity. 
I am a rattlesnake 
at heart. 





If Consummation Were the Noun Form of Consume


Fifty tucked-up wishes reside
inside my chest, each one a witch
with claws, each hiding her own magic, 
beautiful or brutal.

Google glamour. Search shine. 
Yearning for posterity, 
a light in the light. 
Who would want to be forever?

In living, I am first & last,
ordinal, I unleaf--
My filaments and vapors
strewn by wind.

Everything clawed scrabbles up. 
Each desire frills away from me,
dissolves, turns smoke.
My last myth: some hope.




Siân Killingsworth (she/her) has been published in Blue Earth Review, Typehouse Literary Journal, Stonecoast Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry (Poets Resist), and other journals and anthologies. She is the Anthology Editor for the Marin Poetry Center and Curator for the Second Sunday Poetry Series. Find her on Twitter: @sianessa and @2ndSundayPoetry.