Sarah-Joy Milner
Metal. Crimson.
Razor tongue
thrash–
a lapse. Your bent fingers
protruding broken
skin– cat teeth
to cleanse a fight,
or storm, cat would
otherwise
lose.
Prey drive. Yellow,
bent neck scraping,
the sea foamed mouth
of a dog we love.
To love an animal,
is to love the taste of dirt,
of
silver,
of bite.
The mouth is locked,
frozen
screaming on the hand.
‡‡
SARAH-JOY MILNER is an Afro-Indigenous Odawa and Oglala Lakota poet and educator from Ann Arbor, Michigan. An enrolled member of the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians, she holds fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, Indigenous Nations Poets, and Sundress Academy for the Arts, and her poems are forthcoming in Yellow Medicine Review. A Tin House Summer Workshop participant, her work explores cycles, beginnings, and reclamation. She currently resides in Tampa, Florida, where she is completing her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of South Florida as a graduate fellow.
Union Spring Literary Review 