A Love Letter To A Chameleon

I admire your art of blending in
I’ve watched how you exhibit
The mastered tricks of your trade
From early antlers into a crown
Like a faerie perfecting flight
Before you had your wings
When these were Viking days
You’d proudly wear his bones
But for today and your role now
Just his scars will have to do

I know because I wear them too
I stash his music inside my skin
And his song woven from flute
He is my consort and my duality
The particle and my wave
Lets revel in this Bodhi
Dance forth with wine
And pull the moon
Down over our cheeks

Like two shapeshifters
Caught in each other’s gaze
I see your headlights
The deer stuck in you
I see your picked spots
and all your juicy roles
Two conjoined stars
At our souls’ hip
A tangled, tentacle mess
Like when cuttlefish fuck

We both know, we can’t hide
Our newly discovered skins
So lets uncover our smiles
And peer past the fig tree roots
Past the machinations of gender
Past the strangulations of light
For just one glorious moment
Within the madness of these times

I see you

This Muddy Wake

When he comes looking for me
Peering into suffused glints of shadow
Where cranky floorboards whine to nobody
In lonely fields of dead ends and sudden stops
Except my company of wind and its palpable silence

He won’t ever give up, my constant hunter
Like a wolf hot on me and my fox cradled scent
No safety in oak built canopy or snake spun rivers
My voice on constant repeat, “keep running”
Like the sun, the scared, and the prey

I am getting to that age that whenever
The wind blows just right and the moon’s
head is cocked perfectly I hear myself whicker
An aging mule in the candlelight of my bones
My rib tuned piano whispers sharper every day

Soon, I’ll molt off my sun dried summer skin
And ditch the campfire and beer songs
To a cowboy’s goodbye, a wink and a smile
Knelling his shiny bell and his trusty steed
A sequin stitched requiem fallen fallow
Of Fall’s fraying executioner’s dark hood

My bored out heart and overworked hands
Given to the worms, to soil, to dirt, to frost
Culled by bent beak rotting into oblivion
Praying that she’ll burst from my hollowed chest
Like a lotus seed growing from this muddy wake

The Mark Of Fawns

Here is my mark
Set upon gilded ivy
A sublunary creature
Swathed in antler and thorn
Stained holy the color
A throne for august queen
This vale of hearth
My elegant womb

This my mark of ash
Born from fire and rock
Whipsawed juniper scent
Hyacinth cracked seed
Smelt in pricked daisy blood
Swollen veins sated purple
Like split open echinacea
Or when beets fistfight

Here is my mark
Shaped by mountain
Raging river and still lake
Pocked by bird, beast
Tribulation and rapture
Engraved moments’ maws
Knelt to braves given chance
Crushed by graves of season

This is my mark
Cradled upon forehead
My matchbox of bones
Trellised across lit fuse
A pine steeped sacrifice
Set aflame set a hope
An immunity renewed,
Through the mark of fawns

The Staggering Marionette

If my poems had lips they’d hide away in your pout like secret honey
A whispered cache of melody dripping away in a sea of awkward noise

If my poems had balls they wouldn’t be poems at all but skinny dogs
fighting in streets running rabid, their ribs jutting out with fangs bared

If my poems had spines they’d rattle inside snake eyed canyons
Ancient fork tongued slithering duets between hunter and the hunted

If my poems had throats they’d scream til my lungs flooded with blood
Coughing up bad metaphors, non sequiturs and your final kiss
I can still taste it. In thunderstorms. When I think of wolves

If my poems had fingertips they’d rake into your back
Scrawling out a love note just after you came
as you carve out the word goodbye into mine

If my poems had wings they’d be matte black feathery thieves
Snatching up all your keepsakes and shiny troves of treasure
I’d wear your rusty hearts around my claws and caws
And decorate my nest with your rings, vows and lockets

If my poems had stomachs they be distended, swollen and starving
like an Appalachian black bear waking up from its long winter repose

If my poem was you then there would be a long line of past readers
Still searching for the stanzas to fill the absence of your missing words

If my poems could smile they’d swallow up all the sorrow and grief
Lying shipwrecked. Forgotten. Reclaimed under ocean tide

If my poems were hands they’d bleed rivers of stigmata. Noble martyrs
Fallen heir to the holy dance of mountain rock sky dirt and sea
Fallen heiress whom ripped off wings. Whom cut the ropes.
Her birdsong clutching its severed placenta, gently pleading

Come home.

How Much Does A Shadow Weigh?

How much does a shadow weigh?
That it binds the sun to shade?
Veiling prayers of widow and bride
Whispered like poppies from graves

How much strength mustered in hope
To flutter from Indra’s ashen clouds?
Past viscid spidering nets of doubt
And emerge into clear blue skies?

How long does it take for love?
The day never lasts for too long
Though each breath yearns to stay
Moments whipsaw us farther along

How much force does beauty exert?
It burns the hands that hold it too close
A cornered temptress in snowy meadows
Limping moonlit proof her garden remains



Words: Cara Feral
Photo: Les Piccolo

Paper Tigers

I keep my paper tigers close to me
Anxiously pacing, illusory and untamed
Like the last remaining satyr in the world
Crumpled wads that are all bark and no maws
Gilded divertissements that tiptoe around
My real demons and the elephant in my room
Like my fear of getting chained to comfortable
When all I dream about is running as fast as I can

I’ve starved with ecstasy like a cracked beast
I’ve drunk from the chalice of Pan and Dionysus
I’ve thumbed the burnt scar of Her ripped umbilical cord
I’ve built temples in her euphony and clung to crow caw
I yearn for her embrace of juniper and pussypaws
I’ve felt a visceral connection to the call of the wild
This earth, this ocean, this air, this tragic silence
This body. This benevolence. This only wonder

I wish I could be like the others, muzzled
Domesticated, milksop no memory of free
Everyone is so sick but not with the virus
I see a pandemic of Stockholm Syndrome
Folks falling in love with their mobile cells
And elegant decorum of their zoo eyed, glass walls
Problem is that I have kissed the lips of the sky
I’ve feasted on her marrow and milk, I am her blue

Like when we were cubs nuzzled in pounce and purr
When by tooth and claw only the strong survived
Instead of calling an Uber for Taco Bell drive thru
My claws stained regret from suicide by paper cuts
And from folding my demons into origami butterflies
Praying one of them zags free past the catcher’s net
And takes a hold of the frayed ends sailing into the sun
Unraveling the scarecrow of man and burning it down


Words By Cara Feral
Image: From Istock by Getty Images

Something Precious

He comes to me feral with shadowy starving whispers
Tiptoeing across bare legged flits of murmured rendezvous
Skulking lightly upon creaking planks of wincing willow trees
And dead bark festooned upon lodgepole pine and guts of yew

Our age old dance of entangled limbs and Luna’s cast caught
Aposematic called bluff, flushed spades take two queens lost
Aureate autumnal bounty gathered upon antlered crown
Tickled tummies of amaranthine burst lupine fade into frost

I take refuge in curled chestnut tails of foxes and aspen copses
Tumbling down clumsy fawning first stanced awkward prance
My fear for him grew asymptotically almost fully but not quite
Maybe we were lovers, perhaps in another life and circumstance

Winter coats brandish bled fur and first snow blown freeze
I feel the moon mourn me inside my nautilus trellised hunch
Paint your music across my spiraling double stranded sequence
Let’s drink our Rubicon, hold our noses, jump and spit this plunge

Eventually the sum of infinity catches up to my panting Achilles
The wolf closes, encircles by halving Zeno’s paradox striking distance
Something precious like a final breath betwixt time’s pendent jaws
My single bleated prayer offered up as a lamb just before his pounce


Words By: Cara Feral
Art: Shanna Trumbly

Dying Breath

The wind respires life
Through the lungs of the forest
Coughing up man’s smoke

Summer Air

Clinquant melodies of scattering leaves and seed

Soughing plaintively between sunburned hollows

Like perfumed tiny tourists from a passing charabanc

Their lilacs’ scent of sweet sillage lingers for a puff

Leaving painted imaginary doodles of agitated air

Foregathering in the wakes of napes, and marooned nooks

Of plumped and ripened orange bursting splurt lily petals

Their maws squeeze shut on the last gasp of sunshine

Quaking with smiling fey orgasms gasping for breath

As the sun harvests just a few more minutes each day

Reclamation

I once loved the city and its gleaming promise
Of slicked back, urbane haute cultured praxis
Circus sideshows, embonpoint and spectacle
Where cinereous clad clouds hover like buzzards

Circling in place over the dying with talons drawn
A comedy of gnarring error & industrial pageantry
Starbucks, museums, statues of dead presidents
Inexorable pomp de rigeur and saccharine elegance

I once feared the forest
The howls and yowls
Snarls and growls
Footsteps, hisses

Roars, booms, thuds
Shrieks,moans, buzzes
Snaps, crackles, pops
In the blackstill night

Not to mention poison oak
And thirsty wheedling ticks
The shake rattle and roll
Of uliginous snakes

Widow making spiders
Killer bees, dust devils
Packs of wolves, giardia
Raging rivers, wildfires

Exposure, frostbite
Precipitous declines
From dizzying heights
And getting totally lost

But like my abandoned chrysalis
My love for the city left behind
I scratched away my wormed past
My new wings emerge unscathed
To behold the mirabilia of Her bloom,

Serpentine flight paths of dragonflies
And the symmetry of their catstitch eyes
Sewn by the fosterage of drunk artists
Crystallized matrices of etched peaks
Chiseled and embossed by aeons past

Even rainy weeks of ghostly mist
Socked in and grey eventually crack
Aglow at dusk like a pagan fire ritual
My only prayers to ever come true
Or uttered were to the bashful sun

Armageddon doesn’t mean shit
My hope is in the reclamation
Snatched from clumsy apes’ thumbs
Longing for the rightful heiress
And her fawn-eyed return

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