"This Broken Backed World" by Avra Margariti

On my broken back I carry the world: hungry children
drinking the minerals from my exposed bone; battered
women prickling me with needles, yet even they,
adept at the art of patching things up, defeated
by my tectonic fissures and split vertebrae;
men who—for lack of softness to scar—destroy 
themselves, fashioning bandages out of my peeling skin.
And those who are neither man nor woman,
dangling from my ragged clumps of fur,
clinging tooth and nail to the forces trying
to forsake them. 

Rotten roots attempt to trip me, birds made
of pure keratin and spite, swooping down.
Carnivorous bracken find no flesh left to nibble.
The tears of my passengers, acid rain over ravaged earth.

I run quadrupedal, leaping over fermented fords of ichor,
bounding through woods of my fellow skeletons
growing into trees, limbs into boughs. But I have
many more journeys left inside me before I fall apart
and my passengers do too, before we are all dust
and ghosts, feeding this broken-backed world.

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Avra Margariti is a queer author, Greek sea monster, and Pushcart-nominated poet with a fondness for the dark and the darling. Avra’s work haunts publications such as Vastarien, Asimov’s, Liminality, Arsenika, The Future Fire, Space and Time, Eye to the Telescope, and Glittership. “The Saint of Witches”, Avra’s debut collection of horror poetry, is forthcoming from Weasel Press. You can find Avra on Twitter (@avramargariti).

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