Confession #6 Fly with me, fly by me, I don't care. Take the tongue from my mouth, fill me with aerosol lucidity. My tongue doesn't matter. A hummingbird will fill my throat and hover where my voice once stood, heard but not heard, drawn yet uncovered. * The sun frets. I tear at my shirt, aroused by the raggedness there. I am a stranger to water. My tongue is boundless, my mouth is false shelter. I lick the cloud, the coming storm. I pick at my flagging skin. What a human shirt! What monstrosity! I swallow an oasis of dirt. I strip to my bones. The hummingbirds nest in my organs. They seek the drought. * I lap at my lips. There is water there, below my nose, such a strange reservoir, the channel of curved skin, the tongue settling there like a raft. There is a drink of self, a bleed of sweat, an anguished spot of rain drenching the cheeks. The sun isn't real. The sky retreats, and the hummingbird with it, revealing a mouth of sand. Day Darkened nymphs on the feathered lawn, led like men by a certain scent, scrawl their beaks along the ground. The beads of bugs among the weeds soon glide, a dozen juice-filled jewels down the gullets of these thieves. Like men, they stalk on stark-high legs. Stilted menace, yellow knives skewer their departing prey. *** Worm-livered, my mother pecks at my father. Her eyes have gone silvery green from liquor, her tongue a dread scab, a dried worm in itself. What questions she brings. She scratches thoughts through her throat: Screw you. A crow hides in her mouth. *** The morning burns as always. Worms disappear into the earth, and crows pick at the ground where they slither, swallowing nothing but dirt. © Janann Dawkins Janann Dawkins's work has been featured recently or is upcoming in Two Review, decomP, Poesia, among others. Her chapbook Micropleasure was published by Leadfoot Press in 2008. She resides in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where she assists in editing the eclectic literary journal Third Wednesday.