Black Matte Nail Polish

1 Ink

She asked me if I’d ever been manic.
I said I’d swallowed a many-eyed spy

so he could observe the function
of my liver instead of my brain.

I once considered ingesting the soft
and oh so palatable ribcage of

a paper wasp nest. It would be peppery
yet sweet, like how lovers

who smelled of bourbon
should have been.

2 Break Room

He touched my breasts.

I thought of those stamps
with the little ducks and
cried staining lacquer
and wished he knew.

3 Spades

I buried a roadkill turtle from the road
but only after picking the lice-like maggots
free so they wouldn’t suffer.

I named the perennials and the weeds
after my mother. I hoped for rain.
Tadpoles grew and grew into

fat portly things and I wished on them
like shooting stars.

Leafhopper

I show my mom the little green man
with six legs on the milkweed
and I say Tell me he’s real

but she is busy with the statistics
of child endangerment and says
He is a false prophet.

*

That night I’ll dream of mud
and ecstasy and metal walls

patrolled by a fat cat
fed to death

and the mosaic of truth
will come to me

fractured by insect wings.

Saving Grace

Unspool my navel and you will find
my guts lined with swamp grass
that I am storing for the revival
of the Grand Kankakee Marsh.

Water creeps
my eyelids into place
when I sleep

so I may dream of rotting
into something clean.

Grace Downey earned a Bachelor’s of English at Indiana University South Bend. Her poetry has appeared in The Oakland Arts Review, Analecta, The Cape Rock, and Sad Girls Lit Club. Her writing thematically explores LGBT issues, feminism, idolatry, and more. She is currently working on an adult fantasy novel about a succubus reclaiming her identity.

Header image: Storm is my fifteen year old heart kitty.
I was in middle school when I saved up some money from doing chores to adopt him.
We have gotten each other through a lot — him being a constant and loving presence in my life during my lowest mental health moments,
and me nursing him through his diabetes.
He is my best man and it has been such a privilege to have him grow old with me.