Everything Changes Now by Melinda Wilson

There is a knotted ghost
sucking at your wrist; it is a tick,
a numb, fuzzy mass,
an underground straw,
a snake in the gas tank.
You live in an evaporated swamp,
blown up like a bull frog.
Everywhere and everywhere
little pieces of your skin.
Everything changes now.
You woke up repeating and heard
everything changes now.
Like below frost level,
a toad in a mud hole,
your heart rate deliberate and slow.
Detached, it’s clear:
everything changes now.
Frogs buried and sleeping.
No peeking,
no stirring, or peeking.
Bulging eyes or empty
sockets of fish
formerly packed
in the ice of the markets.
Silver dollar scales shed in the wind,
in the black of everything.
Every little thing
you’ve been thinking,
everything changes now.

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Melinda’s poems have appeared in Arsenic Lobster, Diner, The Agriculture Reader, Verse Daily and elsewhere. Her chapbook Amplexus was published by Dancing Girl Press in winter 2010. She is Managing Editor for Coldfront Magazine www.coldfrontmag.com and VIDA: Women in the Literary Arts www.vidaweb.org. She lives and teaches in New York City.