Kathleen Kirk

MIDLAND CEMETERY

Reasons not to speak lay themselves out
in long white gravel scratches

on the scrabbled grass spike-crammed
between tipped & testifying stones.

Dead, dead, we would all proclaim,
a murmur mumbled in the numbed dumb

downward-sucking womb-relaxed ceremony
of organs greeting ant-sewn earth.

This is not something to say
to the man with his tongue in my mouth,

not something to form around it
in palpable syllabics.

I open my mouth onto the bristle of grass,
new taste after his lips, tongue, chin.

Kathleen Kirk works in a bookstore and writes a blog about reading. Her poems appear in a number of print and online magazines, including After Hours, Apparatus, Poems & Plays, and wicked alice, and she has work forthcoming in blossombones, Confrontation, and Blue Fifth Review. You can hear her work at Whale Sound, Poetry Radio/WGLT, and iTunes.