A woman craves a different kind of sleep.
The level of darkness no longer matters.
She curls around an average-sized glass
of fear. She is thirsty. A girl swallows
an acorn and grows a whole forest inside
full of her favorite redwoods and junipers.
She is an ecosystem.
More trees and animals grow
in the loam of her pockets. They are all thirsty.
We smell the fires that burn through forests
in the mountains and talk about the space
being made for other life to grow
until the time she learns to be enough
bramble and thorn to keep men from hacking
and burning away the forest that she’s become.
–
Natalie Giarratano is the author of two full-length poetry collections—Big Thicket Blues (Sundress Publications, 2017) and Leaving Clean (Briery Creek Press, 2013). Her poems have appeared in Beltway Poetry, Tupelo Quarterly, Tinderbox, and American Literary Review, among others.