One Poem by Melissa Studdard

Gaius villosus

Beetle, I silk my burrow for you.
            Short tunnel of darkness. Room

for your body only inside my body.
            I could spin a fable out of this:

Wind whistling through the wheat,
            acacia trees creaking, the earth 

wrapped around me like skin. Outside
            this hole, machinery rumbles

in tune with the angst of the biped,
             slowly harmonizing everything:

a drought song, a wildfire song, a long,
            dissolving corpse on the tongue.

Melissa Studdard is the author of five books, including the poetry collection I Ate the Cosmos for Breakfast and chapbook Like a Bird with a Thousand Wings. Her work has been featured by PBS, NPR, The New York Times, The Guardian, and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, and has also won or placed in The Penn Review Poetry Prize, the Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize for Missouri Review, the Tom Howard Prize, and others.
 
Header photo of trapdoor spider burrow by MrsKirk72, courtesy Pixabay. Photo of Melissa Studdard by Alexis Rhone Fancher.