The Proxy
You hang, head down, a fiend’s joke
dangling in a cave.
Our words fill the hollows with lightning, rain,
bat clicks. When you bite into my ribs,
drums echo against the banks of the river.
I clap together this numbskull’s grin
and swallow the dank air to keep from
laughing:
those wild, yellow curls are lost to me.
You wait, smelling, almost hearing
blood, this damp earth where I bend over.
Colleen Payton is a dance critic and teacher of college English and humanities. Her poetry has appeared in The King's English, Oklahoma Today and Bluestem magazines, among other publications.
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