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. |