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"Web"
by Pris Campbell

Each evening I knit him back to you.
He says you are the screech
of an angry jaybird, a fingernail
raking along a thousand chalkboards.
You sleep in a nun's bed.
Yet, he crawls that dark yarn
home nightly, unraveling me in my
semen-soaked bed of biblical sin.

I think he lies.

I see his once flaccid penis,
swollen taut from my weave,
now take aim at you.
Nun's garb shed, dark breasts
set free, your hips pillowed over
silken sheets, decadent bedspread,
his buttocks, pale as the moon,
rise and fall against you.
Your screech isn't anger;
rather one born of delight.
His back is your chalkboard;
your nails dig in.
New patterns for me to knit
are drawn and redrawn by his tongue
onto the rise of your clitoris.

Dawn calls.
His sweetness now a stench,
I break my needles and toss them.
My yarn covers the front lawn.

* Line 1 is from Ancient Weaving: The Mistress to the Wife, by Rebecca McClanahan

Among other journals and poetry publications, Pris Campbell's poetry has been published in MiPo publications (print/digital/radio/OCHO), Boxcar Poetry Review, Tears in the Fence, Poems Niederngasse, The Dead Mule, Verse Libre, MEAT and several anthologies. Her chapbook, Abrasions, was published by Rank Stranger Press and her chapbook with Tammy Trendle, Interchangeable Goddesses, was published by Rose of Sharon Press. Pris lives in hurricane alley, otherwise known as South Florida, with her husband, one crazy dog and one even crazier cat. Formerly a clinical psychologist, she has been sidelined by CFIDS for 17 years.