Stuck inside a glass eye,
a shatter-proof orb,
it means a lot when the wind is gold
with the seeds of dandelions
in a moss-carpeted field.
You have it
then you lose it
and it sounds like a wheeze
when you travel over pastoral scenes
in this subsuming womb. No daffodils,
no children lying down
with docile beasts, only the sound
of the wind in your head, coarse
Aeolian voice of God. How does
your own voice sound? Like too-
big tires, flush over gravel? Peepers,
high, thick, throaty at midnight?
Clanging? It doesn’t matter.
You are free to move, free
to not speak. The dandy
lionseeds puff out and make
their ways and you follow them there.



For David
This big prism in my hands is heavy, full of the weight
of the light universes it contains
you can look into it                 (if you want),
                                                   but
don’t lose your vision
from its bright red and green
beams skittering across your eyelids,
lest you get the gift of second sight.
All these tiny geometric worlds
cities of sharp-toothed mountains, straight lines going
logically from one place to one
more, refract reaching infinite if
you were to see them.

How is something so regimented so full
of ecstatic trilling
an inaudible but abundantly visible
water glass roundly warping the dinner partner across the table
so formal, so bulging overrun; It,
energy, kept by exceeding Its
container. It’s perfectly maddening, you know, like

a brash splatter
of your strawberry icecreamcone
against a mighty oak, when its sweetness
oozes pink into a picture of a hybrid
lobster-android, too real
to be stuck there/
                             or wandering
(flailing its circuitry, its chrome pincers) around
terrorizing joggers
in the park—



Sunday, smoking
outside my grandmother's house
I saw a grasshopper on the brick stoop
being devoured by ants.
Its legs flailed wildly
as the hungry ones a hundredth of its size
bit it to death.

I wanted to end its suffering
but I was barefooted.



"The rest are all zits,
this one's a brown recluse bite"
the faceless woman said flatly
from behind the counter.
She handed me my cigarettes,
a volcano with a black center
in the middle of her chin.
That was a while back—I remember
nothing else of her, lucky person.


Alex Ledford graduated from the MFA program at the University of New Hampshire. A NC native, she has since come home to live, write, and teach college. She works remotely for Outlook Springs literary journal, and publication history includes Bop Dead City, So to Speak, Midway (Best of the Net ’17 nomination), and others.