Aidan Forster

MINK PORTRAIT AS SEASONAL THREAT-GAPE

Lucky to live three years, we find it
difficult not to fear becoming
the charmable tuft of mange a woman
aubades into her locket’s center,
purled from blight into fur-foamed trace,
our years of deepening life’s luxe deep
hurtling into a single oily girlish print.
When threatened, we threat-gape: we lunge
into the serpent’s zodiac coil. We guffaw,
with cockatiel splendor, menace’s ivory hoof,
our tails the dangering reed of instinct,
our teeth the beribboned & cloistral
number dozing in the center of a circle.
Beautiful, we wax, even in beauty’s zone of collapse.
Blackish tawny, light tawny, our chins
are the fevering white of a long, crisp page
inked with all that might wish us harm.
Our seventh seal nearly cracks into speech: O you
who men adore more than themselves,
might you save us for some little, some more?
Knowing terror lopes by more’s left hand.
Rasputin, calico Rasputin, the forest
trills back on its little deciduous piccolo.
Small furbearers with big attitudes, the men
chant in their treatises on doom & its watershed.
We understand ourselves as the animal referent
of the first man’s first fright, & plenitude
its terrible source: which round thing carries
the most sweet juice? Which bolting thing
deserves the spiral cicatrix of this letter, then that?
Crass lily. Crass gardenia. Crass gloxinia,
a single petal dooms our maw to overspill.
When we imagine the other side of the threat-gape,
we imagine a garden roiling with newborn minks,
a furious heaven over which harm might zoom.
When we approach the end of something,
we mock its certitude. We demise-gape,
the project of eternity brambling in our white gums.
We smuggle ourselves on a mammalian barge
barreling toward the little green door of human recognition.
When we say we will do something gorgeously,
how else would you expect us to do it?

AIDAN FORSTER is a queer writer from Greenville, South Carolina. They are the author of the chapbooks Exit Pastoral (YesYes Books) and Wrong June (Honeysuckle Press), and their work appears in The Adroit Journal, Best New Poets 2017, Copper Nickel, Ninth Letter, The Rumpus, Teen Vogue, Tin House, and Washington Square. They study Literary Arts and Public Health at Brown University.