DOG IN A HOT CAR

To break glass with emergency hammer
should be one of the greater satisfactions.
Pet mice peeing on the hands that feed them.
Ritual of the goodly daughter: wounded on demand
at the mall jewelry store. Contact dermatitis
is a beautiful name for a nickel allergy. A sexcapade.
Suburban lawn fractal with rabbits. Security cameras
in the eyes of plastic owls. Hold a mirror to the mouth
of your marriage, and see no mist. Forget your fear
in the long grasses. Coquettish request for a tick check.
A young skunk rootles glamorously in a tulip bed.
Your friends back away. You alone go towards it.

Cowardly lion, how brave you can sound
in a poem. Naming not the war. Cherishing the humble-
bees their pollen pantaloons. Admiring counterfeit
fossil collections: starfish carved in shale, real
ancient amber melted over last month’s mosquitos.
Your father sends two bottles of feijoa vodka.
Your mother, a scan of the growths in her jawbone.
Root canal envy when the dentist touches
your darling somewhere you can never enter.
But loving too much can stifle a life. Leave
the vehicle’s windows down a little. Enough to slip
a tongue through, sip the bitumen on the wind.

IMMATERIAL GIRL

Now you have a firefly in the jar
what are you to do?
The gonedark blank
between chartreuse exposures.
Death is always interesting
because the living do the burying.
In a perishable hour
the complicating factor.
Hoarfrost. Heatwave.
Cold front. Trolley problem.
Rebuilt ship. Replacing board
by board your life until it is
not you who sails inside it.
Overnight: voice memo empires
rendered unreachable by the time
it takes for the sun to rise all the way
around a doggone day.
Emotional chew toy.
Scrimshaw jawbone.
Chainmailer forging suits
out of electroplated boredom.
The river refuses to change
no matter how many times you step in it.
My slack body shifts the patterns of rain
sidewinding in the gutter. Call it a flow state.
A penny drop.
A pleasure boat. A microdose.
Chastened obedience to the microbiome.
Spring chickens with fruiting bodies.
Pocket knife : grave dirt : nail polish.
Apologetic swelling in the glottis.
Mouthfeel of camellia buds
that rot as soon as blossom.
The period-blood-dark sea.
Graceless farewells
of indeterminate nationality.
When you disappeared from the party
we assumed you’d just stepped out
somewhere more possible
to return from.
Fresh air. Homecoming daydream.
Glossolalia : glossary of terms.
Abandoned parrot
mimicking the prior owner’s
bedroom soundscape.
Who shouldn’t like to be
brought to answer
eloquently
in a field–
depending on the question
and who’s asking?

DISASTER TOURISM

I need to stop showing beautiful women in bars the photos
of dead animals on my phone. Bottle flies like peridots

pinned to a squirrel pelt. The pressed flowers of Michigan: roadkill
bucket list. Pancaked opossum, raccoon, chipmunk. Decimated family of ducks.

Deer with no head. I moved to the Midwest because I like to see green things
turn red. Ornamental maple, ruby ficus, pitcher plants whose tendrils blush

for flesh. I used to savour cravings like this: scarlet lipped. Now I only write
about my thirst. That girl raising house wine to her mouth... listen

as she swallows spit while speaking. Watch her sultry swoop of neck. Circling
overhead, I can’t tell swans from crows from turkey vultures. Nature is precious

but the mosquitos here are something else. Reassuring at least that I still bleed
where I get bit. And I’ve bought all these potted plants which means

maybe I don’t intend to leave. Among the ducklings pasted on the highway,
one ugly baby swan. The fate of certain cygnets: to stay lonely.

Rebecca Hawkes is a queer painter-poet from rural Aotearoa New Zealand. Her first book was Meat Lovers (Auckland University Press) - winner of a Laurel Prize for ecopoetry, and a Lambda Literary Award finalist. Her chapbooks are Softcore Coldsores and Hardcore Pastorals, published in the AUP New Poets series and Cordite. She is head shepherd of poetry journal Sweet Mammalian and co-edited the climate poetics anthology No Other Place to Stand. In the US her poems have been awarded Salt Hill's Philip Booth Poetry Prize, Palette Poetry's Sappho Prize, and an Academy of American Poets Prize, while her manuscripts have been finalists in contests from Yesyes Books, Green Linden Press, and Alice James Books. Her new work is forthcoming in places like the Threepenny Review, Sixth Finch, and the Georgia Review. Rebecca has just completed an MFA in yearning (and, to a lesser extent, poetry) at the University of Michigan.