Kim Welliver
Image by Mathias Cooper from Pexels
Kim Welliver lives in Utah where she works as a full-time caregiver. She is currently working on a full-length poetry collection. Both a 2021 Pushcart Prize and Best of Net nominee, her work can be found in print and online publications, including Rock & Sling, Mid-American Review, Night Picnic, Corvid Queen, Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, Fairy Tale Review Anthologies and many others.
The Mannequins Speak
Nevada, Yucca Flats, March 17, 1953
the desert dawn is a broken wing lifting
the night’s cheek
is a bleak arroyo filled with wind and bones
the words milktooth and mercury
should be sucked like hard candy
the coyote is the moon’s acolyte, its song
a canticle of need
the mushroom’s umbel carries more venom
than any scorpion’s sting
we would say even plaster martyrs hold the gospel of bees
beneath their tongues
if we could speak, we would say just as the wasp hives the ox’s
sand-scrubbed sacrum, so men seed destruction
through the world’s bones
if we could speak
we would bless the cool undoings of dawn’s juniper light
and the wrecked grace of the desert’s irradiant decay
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©2022 West Trade Review
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