Please be advised that these poems contain mature content.

Skirt

The paved mouth
howls and screeches
the outer edge.

Brawny crops
in anthropoid unison
squeeze the inner hem.

The margin bursts
a flourish of greens,
purples and fleshy ochers.

A peppery skirt–
defining the bony legs
of July.

 

Invasive Species

Sidewalks billow generations
of dandelions out of concrete mouths,
made smaller by the gravity of glass
and steel beaming, the
grey sky turned violet.

Breathy and coffee stained,
my smile clothed in a frown.
Posture like Saint George, creeping
into the dragon’s cave. A chest
full of hot air and soot, spilling out
into the South Saskatchewan.

The expanse of prairie grasslands
in sways and orchestras
of Horned Red-Dock, Yellow Star Thistle
and Wind Witch, revealing so many pages
of land. Songs sung long before partitioning,
theft and the piling of bones.

Tiny pebbles and glass imbedded
on my knee, braille for ever-present
timelines. My skin reveals veins that resemble
rivers on a map. I trace them, trying to locate
a less invasive vascularity.

 

Flowering

I lay on the sweating grass,
imagine my testicles
as downy green
poppy pods.
Tiny apertures
uncloaking
crimson-furrowed
petals.

Fondling discretely
over my shorts,
I clutch a coated wad
of wormy varicoceles.
Achy elastic roots,
re-formed
by the certainty
of gravity and a lack
of sun.

 

Grasslands

Chest hair furls the top
of a white t-shirt.
Bunches of unkempt grass
spew over a bleached fence.

Summer tasting air
conducts a dance
on a hairy patch
of earth.

Sun leaps
scribbling
linear shadows.

 

References:

Zachari Logan, “Skirt,” 2023, publication Forthcoming.

Zachari Logan, “Invasive Species,” “Flowering,” and “Grasslands,” in A Natural History of Unnatural Things, Radiant Press, 2021.