Feature image by Evan Nesbit, Porosity (High-Order Aberration), 2015. 79 x 68 inches. Acrylic, dye, and burlap. © Evan Nesbit. Courtesy of the artist and Eleven Rivington Gallery.

Hovering above
the wheedle brown—
gaunt mud
sucking, hissing dryly

thinking I saw animals in there—
putting something
haughty in the way I held my

bones—to signal
I am human—stay away

the mud full of me—
slow—deliberate sloth
resuming and then
breaking off

not suddenly but with
the purpose
of a stomach being sucked in
hard

the crepuscular
instant when the eyes
go under
then the face

pointed outward like ears
but the ears choked
with brine

Katy Lederer

Katy Lederer is the author of the poetry collections Winter Sex and The Heaven-Sent Leaf (American Poets Continuum), as well as of the memoir Poker Face: A Girlhood Among Gamblers. Poems, essays, and reviews have recently appeared in The Enemy, VOLT, The Boston Review, and CURA. She is currently at work on a collection of poems titled The Engineers.