Abduction in the Month When God Goes Walking in Bear Hide Boots
The leopard swiveled clockwise under the down and wool of her bed. Three silver bells were tied to the leopard’s tail; he braided one into her hair, hooked one in each of her earlobes. He opened his mouth of pine forests, his throat full of ice, his tongue of lava, sandstone, and sulphur. His burning hide of black rosettes crushed her cold skin, crumpling stilt walks, a thin, windowless pelt. Philosophizing, this panther strangled her blood-stained collar, accepted no payments—only hot milk and tar flames filled his belly. Past the steam turbines and the nylon-cold winter, she spotted the germ of an orange advent. He opened his jaws, swallowed her whole with his mouth of pine forests, his throat of ice, and his tongue of ash and boiled mud. He stitched orchid lace into a quilt of no comfort and swallowed it with his mouth of smokestack fields, his throat of ice, his tongue of obsidian glass. Until he left her, on a rust-proofed abandonment, vulcanized rubber gratings to chew between her teeth.
She walked back to town with grey hair and a wrinkled scar on the back of her neck. People in the banks and the supermarkets called her the widow, the widow of the dewclaws. A tooth the size of a thumb hung from a fishing wire tied around her neck, and she’d hold out her palm where the burnt likeness of white paws and pewter face stood, stamped into a patron’s medal. And if, very early in the morning, if some jogger or bystander should cross her path and ask the truth, she will oblige, and bare the black rosettes showering the skin of her back.
T.M. Göttl’s most recent chapbook is “A Hurricane of Moths,” published by NightBallet Press. Among her readings in 2012, she performed poetry in Charlotte, NC at National Poetry Slam, and for the second consecutive year at Chicago’s VeganMania. Also in 2012, she received nominations for a Rhysling Award and a Pushcart Prize. She has a forthcoming full-length collection titled Unclaimed Baggage and Tax-Free Weekends to be launched in early 2013. She lives in Northeast Ohio, where she herds library books and three pet chickens.