by Conyer Clayton
(Content Warnings: natural disaster, violence)
Light passes over in brittle strips. A staggered revelation—
someone’s always staring in the woods. Loneliness is
necessary for stable footing. Can you hear where needles
cover rot? Someone else can decide which branches will
catch fire as a storm crawls over the canopy. A fawn draws
back as I reach out. I know my hand seems empty but I’m
telling you it’s not. Eyes glow brighter in the dark. Wind
exposes white stone. I laugh. Eat the jagged air. My voice
always makes animals scatter, dust in an open field. They
commune out of sight, become a swirling mass that destroys
whole towns. Hooves cleave through hallways. Feathers clog
chimneys. A heavy haunch batters against tile. A shattered
mirror. A lashed eye lolling. The walls cave in, but they know
how to dig. Cloven things are intimate with earth. They
tunnel back to the woods. I have no choice but to wait. I feel
them coming long before their noses push up between
boulders. They shake off the worms, and back away slowly
into the black columns of space between trees.
CONYER CLAYTON is a gymnastics coach, editor, musician, and author of many chapbooks, recently, Towers (Collusion Books, Spring 2021) by VII, of which she is a member. Her debut full-length collection, We Shed Our Skin Like Dynamite (Guernica Editions, 2020), was a finalist for the 2021 Relit Award and Ottawa Book Awards. “Exposure” is from her forthcoming second book, a collection of surrealist prose poetry.
exposure can be found in Augur Magazine Issue 4.1.
