Wormwood

by Jessica Otto

She has black dirt on her face.
The ruins of a garden plucked
for winter stain her hands.
She has scratched that greenery free
and bathed in the empty
soil, praying for next year’s harvest
with touches
of bare arms and thighs.

She rubs the flesh of the earth,
places stones in her mouth
careful of her teeth
though she knows
this is ritual.
Her tongue rolls in the grit,
Hips turn the ground like a spade.
She says, “I will starve myself for the gods
so I can grow poison in the spring.”

The Patron Saint of Unaccountable Muses

by Jessica Otto

The lady is an iron vulture, a
drunken shadow teetering

on the edge of the shore line,
voted most likely to trip

over a horseshoe crab.
She was throttled and hung

from a phallic cactus when
the stock market crashed

for the second time.
No one stayed around for her

resurrection, no one
watched her catch a crow in mid

take off, stick two fingers down
its throat and pop her eyeball

out of its broken beak.
She kept the noose for its neo-hippie look

and moved into an alley off of
Capitol Street. Last I saw of her

she was feeding the stray cats
slightly green slices off her right

arm and passing out cigarettes
to the working girls.