Forest Grove

We grieve to carry it down into our mouths, the fear.
Familiar, yet unknown. We know fire, we know blood.
The landscape floods a sour taste. We satiate.
A salt, a metallic spice that bitters as much
as blooms a musk undertone.

We are learning
to taste humans despite how sick they make us.

Electrical flavor, a live singing buzz that awakens
something ancient long asleep or dead. This blood
is a poison. It rattles roots to limbs. We shiver.
Each of us, in our own way, pucker and contract.
Fear as an odor is absorbed, but this is potent.

This limb here is that of a human, sprawled in its
unnatural shell, its inner body a secret from the earth.
Anticipation consumes, we salivate and squirm,
teasing out our tongues to find the meat,
to taste, again, the dread.

These are not remains of
an animal who gives of its body freely, and we taste
the cries for life with a dilation. 

***

Corinne Hughes is a queer poet, essayist, and fiction writer. Her work has been supported by a scholarship from Tin House and a fellowship from the National Book Foundation. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Passengers Journal, High Shelf Press, and Cathexis Northwest press. Her essays can also be found online at Museum Studies Abroad. Born in the Texas hill country, she now resides in Portland, Oregon with her two blue Finnish gerbils.