Emilee Kinney

Root-Bound

The silk heads curl inwards,
brown and cracked like overgrown

fingernails and I’ve never owned
a tropical plant, but I’ve killed this one,

mercilessly. I unhook its hanging pot
from the front porch rail, imagine

how to unhook my jaw,
how to click my teeth back to swallow

the dead fern whole. Soil crumbling
at the corners of my stretched mouth,

pooling along my collarbone dish, I’d chew
the roots too, maybe even the plastic pot scarred

by too much sun. Let the neighbors watch,
let their jaws unhook too, let the sun, a ripe lemon

thrown into the air and forever falling back to us,
finally unhook from its false sea, let it fall

and coat our eyes, our tongues
with the thick citrus this grass failed

to breathe. Mugwort drips from the bottom
of the pot, split like the blinds a mile away,

the eyes slit through glass: concave, convex, pane—
you who watch the lemongrass burn, let my palms fill

with its ash, tell me why we think the dead still taste,
why they’d want to be tasted by us. Even the mugwort

leaves are riddled with rot, black spots blemish
each green frond like the ringleted mold

cascading my walls. I tried to grow
lemongrass for a pop of color,

to cleanse the air, for all the reasons
our grandmothers tell us to.

I unhook my breastbone, open my body wide.
Watch as I fold each stem, tuck them

between my ribs, dry balm for the restless scrape
within my cavernous—no, ravenous—folds.

Can you hear it from there? This body, my body,
an unsplit pot where everything curls in on itself.  

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Emilee Kinney hails from the small farm-town of Kenockee, Michigan, near one of the Great Lakes: Lake Huron. She received her MFA in poetry at SIU Carbondale and is currently pursuing her PhD at the University of Southern Mississippi. Her work has been published in Passages North, West Trestle Review, Cider Press Review, SWWIM and elsewhere. www.emileekinneypoetry.com.