Reciprocity

Spirals have become an unexpectedly large part of my life
all because of a book I myself have not read.

There, within the gyre of the snail shell—
it rests on my hand nearly weightless

though it is the largest snail I have ever seen. With my finger
I used to trace the rounded lightning of their tracks

through the chalk that we painted onto the greenhouse glass
each spring.

Other unexpected developments: you are a patient man,
disinclined to jeering.

When it comes to the question of reciprocity
I find that I am a little lost.

There, the unfinished spiral of the stairs down the cliff
to the mussel shoals, to the intoxicant seaweed, to the sea

itself. The waves crest the rocks with a roar, the foam
is cast into the air again and again.

Solistice

Watch how worship lifts the chest
like breath.

I am returning
to my old journals. I am trying

to understand. Nights follow days.
The moon moves

across the horizon. The marbles
have gone egg shaped. Their orange is

the sky before a life-altering
storm. We will someday

go sailing. I want flowers
in my hair.

A country in recovery, we possess a

Craving for the pulse, the animal irony, the rifle crescendo before
Thanksgiving.

For a hunter’s degenerate theater, the bleeding is external, the
epicenter fades
from view.

Sistering may yet be the antithesis
to the bloodbath of November. 

Author’s Biography

K.T. Mills lives in Washington DC. She is a recipient of the Elisa Brickner Poetry Prize and a Poetry Archive Now Worldview 2022 winner. Her work can also be read in The Rialto, Moria Literary Magazine, and Mud Season Review.