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Avalon
  • Home
  • Spring 2025
    • Poetry
      • A Soulmate
      • All the Globe's a Stage
      • At The Water's Edge
      • Big Sisters
      • Cotton-Stuffed Heart
      • Doom, Sleep, Mastication, and My Godson Jeremiah
      • Foolish Lemons
      • I Know Icarus
      • nightstand as self-portrait
      • one thousand three hundred and eighty-eight days
      • Pasiphaë
      • Poem for a Stranger
      • Pilot of the Hollow Vessel
      • Rehoming; or, a habitat for creatures who seek darkness and cold
      • Sanctuary
      • The World Inside a Sidewalk Crack
      • Year of the Frog
      • you think it's easy opening doors in january?
      • Your Haiku
    • Fiction & Plays
      • Calculated Sympathy
      • Indigo
      • Maurice
      • The Cradle
      • The Hollow Room
    • Visual Art
      • A Farmer in Vinales Cuba
      • A Tobacco Farmer in Viñales, Cuba
      • Thank you, please come again
      • Self Reflective Self Portrait 5
    • Contributors
  • Past Issues
    • Fall 2024
      • Poetry
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    • Home
    • Spring 2025
      • Poetry
        • A Soulmate
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        • At The Water's Edge
        • Big Sisters
        • Cotton-Stuffed Heart
        • Doom, Sleep, Mastication, and My Godson Jeremiah
        • Foolish Lemons
        • I Know Icarus
        • nightstand as self-portrait
        • one thousand three hundred and eighty-eight days
        • Pasiphaë
        • Poem for a Stranger
        • Pilot of the Hollow Vessel
        • Rehoming; or, a habitat for creatures who seek darkness and cold
        • Sanctuary
        • The World Inside a Sidewalk Crack
        • Year of the Frog
        • you think it's easy opening doors in january?
        • Your Haiku
      • Fiction & Plays
        • Calculated Sympathy
        • Indigo
        • Maurice
        • The Cradle
        • The Hollow Room
      • Visual Art
        • A Farmer in Vinales Cuba
        • A Tobacco Farmer in Viñales, Cuba
        • Thank you, please come again
        • Self Reflective Self Portrait 5
      • Contributors
    • Past Issues
      • Fall 2024
        • Poetry
        • Fiction & Plays
        • Visual Art
        • Contributors
      • Spring 2024
        • Poetry
        • Fiction
        • Visual Art
        • Contributors
      • Fall 2023
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        • Contributors
      • Spring 2023
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        • Short Stories and Plays
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      • Spring 2022
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 Spring 2025     Poetry 

Rehoming; or, a habitat for creatures who seek darkness and cold

Natalie Gales

A moss crawls in

the inner corners of my mouth.

It finds purchase in plump flesh.

When no one’s watching,

I strip it away with my teeth.

I swallow it down,

pray it’s quelled by bile.

 

The moss craves quiet resettlement,

clings to my gullet and my tongue before

claiming my lips.

Don’t kiss me; fear the brush of the unfamiliar,

lest it tear your skin away.

 

Moss creeps further: down my chin, up my jawbone, across my brow.

Spores seize the untapped forest, cloak it in a second skin.

The trees bloom green, an invader at war with its mother.

 

My moss trails from my eyelashes, drapes my hair, hangs from fingertips, clings to the hem of

my dressing gown.

I leave behind two sets of footsteps, boot prints blurred by my train.

I am a biome, we are symbionts; a creature anointed.

 

We escape the present company; we creep by backroads, coalesce into the cypresses, collapse

into the earth; just another organism petrified, arms thrown wide to reap dappled light

and westerlies, mouth agape, shelter to the yellow-throated warblers.

A Soulmate

All the Globe's a Stage

At The Water's Edge

Big Sisters

Cotton-Stuffed Heart

Doom, Sleep, Mastication, and My Godson Jeremiah

Foolish Lemons

I Know Icarus

nightstand as self-portrait

one thousand three hundred and eighty-eight days

Pasiphaë

Poem for a Stranger

Pilot of the Hollow Vessel

Rehoming; or, a habitat for creatures who seek darkness and cold

Sanctuary

The World Inside a Sidewalk Crack

Year of the Frog

you think it's easy opening doors in january?

Your Haiku

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