Table of Contents

T.M. Göttl

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.

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