Sugar, Salt, Dioxide

My love, the fox has died.
You think her unmoving but look.
Tonight, her body will swell

from the urge of the underworld.
Do not press your hand to her face,
she is the slipping dead now.

Rains wet. Orange lactarius
scents the corpse maple.
Oh atrium, oh artery,

be still, the beetles
hail the lungs. Rot out the grief,
the tail. Look.

In the end we fold inward,
each rib showing the cage
we carry in our chest

while decay raises small flags
of glory across membranes soft as once-was.
The fine lines of mycelium

route down to soil.
The trees shake
with yowls of a life lived

by bird in mouth. There is nothing
that is not a contraction.
Look.

The snag will split
open Hericium snowfall.
The underside of

Marasmiellus’s will release
spores,
the fox so gone

you have her ear bones in your eyes

Amanita calyptroderma

Cocorra, Cocorra the raven speaks
again, then again,
from the lichen beasted tree.

Where there is hollow, I want more.

I undo my slip, reveal breasts,
a skillet, a broth made of roadkill and mustard.

I work so hard to drag each animal home.

In the morning she is gone.
Having laid eggs down my trail,
she leaves me dirt-kneed, digging

naked,
baskets tied to my ankles,
birds at my shoulders.

Tonight, a fisherman will find me,
and because I will be hungry,
and because he will have hands made strong by seawater,

I will tire of crawling
and eat his haul instead.

Kelly Gray is a writer living nine miles and seven fence posts away from the ocean with her family on unceded Coast Miwok and Southern Pomo Land. She is the recipient of the Tusculum Review Chapbook Prize for her manuscript The Mating Calls of the Specter, the Neutrino Prize from Passages North, and an attendee of the Kenyon Review’s Workshop in Poetry. Recently, Gray’s work has recently appeared in Southern Humanities Review, Portland Review, Rust & Moth, and Northwest Review. Her collections include Instructions for an Animal Body (Moon Tide Press), and Tiger Paw, Tiger Paw, Knife, Knife (Quarter Press, Gold Medal Winner from IPPY), and Quag Daughter (Dancing Girl Press).

Published October 15 2023