Animals: “Ode to Animalism” by Emma Miao

Ode to Animalism

January was a flurry of snakes in the nailbed.

Fingers in my foaming mouth. A red smear 
trailing from my doorstep.

Ruptured sky 

a bouquet of scars. I am forgiven, 
I whisper

as the humid water runs down my back. 
As in, a body spared from its owner, jerked
onto a splotchy mattress. How quickly 
body becomes unbody. 
As in, abandoned babies on the interstate. 

How quickly 
the mouth accepts what lies upon it. 

On the asphalt, horns drown out the babies’ cries—mumma, mumma
while I’m sitting in my bathroom, 

chipped nails scratching
this stitched navel. mumma, mumma
as I run rubied razors 
over my legs, bristle to cream, child to flood,
It is self-gentrification. 
Black hair tessellates
down the drain 
calling mumma, mumma
& my widowed parts surge 
through the gutters. I open my palms to the rain.

About Emma Miao

Emma Miao is a poet from Vancouver, Canada. Her work appears in Diode Poetry Journal, Cosmonauts Avenue, Atlanta Review, Rust + Moth, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, and The Emerson Review. Her poem ‘Rabbits on the Balcony’ won the Fiddlehead’s 2021 Ralph Gustafson Prize for Best Poem. Her debut chapbook, “Geography of Mothers,” is forthcoming from Frog Hollow Press in 2021. She is the winner of the F(r)iction Poetry Contest, a finalist for the Atlanta Review International Poetry Prize, a commended Foyle Young Poet, and an alumna of the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio. She is sixteen years old.