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The poet gone into hibernation

E. Elizabeth Watkins

The poet gone into hibernation does not want to give herself up

(she is a woman, somehow I know this) to the juicer and still

I pull poems from her teeth and teeth from her skull because I can.

Because I own her, she is mine and I am one that owns her, owning up

to the crime of perfect extraction. She both gives and regrets, leaving

sticky pulp in the gears that I have to clean out after closing, regrets

giving but can’t help it. Even so, I envy her ability to emaciate herself

and the delicacy in which she pulls fiber after fiber apart, each centimeter

a line, each cell and atom and electron the fibers of being of which

I cannot get enough; cannibalism was never on the agenda; it happened

organically. But she is sleeping, and you are right to say so. The poet is sleeping

and I am creeping up behind her to make stolens out of unorchestrated fibers.

Sweet poet, I cannot weave them, sweet poet, do not grieve them

and the frayed rhyme scheme that threatens to seam them, disintegrating