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.