print previewback TYLER MILLS
Rattlesnake
The scales pattern like rose petals—bladed.
I’ve never seen a wild one, a pink one.
What is pink? What is wild? The instant
oatmeal and flax box this morning
quoted Euripides—something about a tree.
Leaves versus fruit. Like an unexploded bomb,
rain lifted the loop from its hole in the dirt.
So much of what I mean moves away
from language—the mind an edge
of a mountain backlit at dusk. My child.
For now, my arms cradle you on the path,
your vertebrae curving like a shepherd’s crook.
Snailed, feet frogged. From the earth, I think.
The grass stirs as though with a wooden spoon.
I am an I that wraps around itself
like a ring around the sun. Shed skin.
Apples and plums. Season of knowledge.
Fly home to your loft, little bird, I think, and the blued
clouds shift like consumer preferences above us.
Venom there, on the ground, in a mouth.
What I carry is like remembrance, but before memory. 
Big Heart, Little Heart
Imaging
Rattlesnake
Tree