Expedition Notes 13

Carrie Bennett
| poetry

 

[a survival guide]

 

I’m learning to collect poisonous
plants to help preserve

what little food I have
left. In my small hollow

a few inches of edible leaves
insects and their dried

bodies brittle wing-bright.
I’ve been here all winter

my skin so pale its luminescence
lights the underground path.

Now darkness means throat, a trap-
door to surrender. I

still catch myself looking
at my wrist. I make orange

flags from an old blanket.
I leave them hanging

along the rock-walls
as I push further past.

Carrie Bennett is a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellow and author of biography of water and several chapbooks. Her second full-length poetry collection, The Land Is a Painted Thing, was selected by Kimiko Hahn for the Hilary Tham Capital Collection and will be published in 2016.

Next
County Fair
Previous
Etruscan Vase