wildscape. literary journal

Adding to the Collection
by Candice M. Kelsey

of bug bites, I leave the farmhouse
like a white-tailed deer darting 
from honeysuckle. Thunder, the white 
underside of tail. Flash! I serpentine

the gravel to Firefly cabin, an old 
chicken coop surrendered. It’s my

first writer’s residency, Eastern
Tennessee, where I ride pillion over
the Appalachians on a white pine

saddle porch, well-oiled in warblings.
All sweat and legs, I am siren song 

to ill-mannered ticks, mosquitos, 
and fire ants. Six feet from the ’78 VW 
Scirocco junked in the switchgrass
like a giant Moroccan-spiced carrot 
over parsley. Found oozing Za’atar car.

Can I too be abandoned, just read? 

Or is the expectation that I peel out
and burn 2000+ words a day? I know this
week’s about adding to my collection,

like a fresh set of bites. Bugs make
it happen by surrendering to the urge,
a primal thirst for plasma proteins.
I discourage them, there’s nothing too 
special in these veins. Try to reason, 

just sloppy white cells from Slavs 
who fled the Holodomor. They don’t

buy it for a second. Blackberries
remind me to check for ticks, a body

of crevices empty as a phone, no word
from my mother. No tweezers to fire up
and grab hard-bodied blood-suckers
determined to remain attached. Free
of her abuse, no contact is a bitch.

Once I sat on a dock with a woman 
I secretly love. Hours of dipping toes
into the canal. I should have taken her 
hand then, traced the curve of each nail.

Am I alone in desiring small things?
Sun glinting the water, her lovely name

a ruby dew. I extract a poem, droplets
of verse from this heat dome summer
where we exist a menagerie in the shed 

of some god pawing at his collection.
Hope he knows what the fuck he’s doing.

about the author // Candice M. Kelsey