Naomi Bess Leimsider
who’s been keeping you alive minute after minute. your embryonic body
stuck between necessary — essential — phases. you who are hot under the eyes
and in your teeth: a constant low grade fever is dangerous. Sick from the start
you have sunk into the dirty earth.
Only twenty days past and it is already time to crawl back to the cave
and the site of your wild evolution.
Your bones exhausted, given in to gravity, become nothing more than all
the kicked up dust in the world.
***
Naomi Bess Leimsider has published poems and short stories in Newtown Literary, Otis Nebula, Quarterly West, The Adirondack Review, Summerset Review, Blood Lotus Journal, Pindeldyboz, 13 Warriors, Slow Trains, Zone 3, Drunkenboat, and The Brooklyn Review.