Alligators
Amber Decker


Ever since those early hours
we spent talking in your car
with the heat up and the cold, hard rain
of December beading on your windshield,
I've done nothing
but think of alligators.
You used to keep one in your basement,
which you turned into a wetland,
taking great pains to carve out
a space in your life for something
so wild it could drag you
into darkness, eat you alive.
In rare moments of sleep,
my dreams are filled
with black columns of teeth
rising up from temples of open mouths
that sit still as stone and wait
for some warm body
to fill the empty spaces between.
I have spent my entire life
submerged in my own impatience.
My hunger follows me
into the waters of tenderness
like a tail that will flail
at the first fresh scrape of doubt,
hard enough to shatter kneecaps.
From the moment I saw you,
I've done nothing
but think of alligators.
I have wanted to be rolled
under and into, wanted
your hands or your teeth on me
in places where scars
are easily covered.
From your basement steps,
you cast live chickens into the shadows
where the gator hissed and thrashed
while you stood at a distance and listened
to the dark, bittersweet song
of crunching bones.

About the author:
Amber Decker is a thirty-something poet from West Virginia. Her work has been included in the groundbreaking literary e-zine Exquisite Corpse, as well as other hip venues for alternative writing: Zygote In My Coffee, Arsenic Lobster, Phantom Kangaroo, Bone Orchard, Specter Magazine, Red Fez, and Black Heart Magazine, to name just a few. She is a lover of hooded sweatshirts, comic books, werewolf movies, good wine, tattoos, and Miles Davis. Her latest collection of poems, The Girl Who Left You, is available from California's notorious Six Ft. Swells Press.