I’ve come again, though you didn’t expect me,

blue wobbly dawn, bat’s flickering whirs,

one thin slice of moon melting down

to ice water.
I’ve travelled so far, always a foreigner,

the kind of mongrel the media’s lost interest in,

long curly eyelashes, glittery plum lips,

mitteleuropean accent—neither one thing nor another. 
I know the language of disaster and fear,

I can turn the trees inside out, sap begging

for soil, I can make your sister crawl on her

knees, hair dragging through the muck.

I can make your boyfriend take off his work overalls

and sink into the swamp looking for more of me:

more and more and more and more.
Each bright dialect of the forest is familiar,

even so long after we used to cavort here,

no dryads, no fawns, but that doesn’t make

me a stranger. I can suck down on sea air

like soda-pop, I can buck and twist the

earth in pleasure, wolves prowling all over

my skin, shared red vibrations.
Down the hill the men collect in hi-vis

and hard hat, small and ugly with their

clipboards and concrete and server cooling solutions.

But the season is changing, ancestral blood

boiling underfoot like lava.
The smell of their money mutes

the acrid leaves, the woodsmoke,

the scents of mud and sex, the interlocking

crescendos, green angry births,

both desperate and ecstatic.
Money for breakfast, money for lunch,

but by dinnertime all of their heads

on my table, viscera placed just so,

like a creepy flower arrangement,

black-cave mouths eating nothing now,

and my quick, hot stink

tearing through the undergrowth,

everything that is mine returned to me.