Happy foot sad foot

This world is equally home to sleeping dogs
and intestinal parasites
eyebrow brushes and Congress
the Everglades and Supercuts and Russian delis
where shopkeepers plunge bare hands
into buckets of sardines
It belongs to the rotating sign outside
the Silver Lake foot clinic
that predicts what kind of day you’ll have
depending on whether Happy Foot
or Sad Foot flashes
as you drive by
To the smell of rubbing alcohol
To the erogenous zone behind the ear
It belongs to bats trapezoids hot glue guns asthma
the butcher’s freezer the piano teacher’s shoe
all our radioactive sites
our apple cores
our sex dust and strobe lights
Every hair you’ve pulled from your soup
belongs on this earth as much as you
Any superiority you feel toward horny toads
or iceberg lettuce
is as narcotic a delusion
as the belief that your voice in recordings
is not the voice in your mouth

Knew the kiss of butterfly to net

knew falling through a soundproof window
kept the whale skeleton at the bottom of the ocean
kept blowhole
knew silence
knew how to love a man using three tongues
knew roadkill
kept silence
kept a mirror that wouldn’t keep eye contact
knew electrolyte replacement
knew when lungs choked on water
kept the hidden room behind the pantry
knew grandmother becoming a wolf
kept citrus burn of dry-swallowed benzo
kept screwdriver
kept silence of manhole opening
someone vanishing inside
manhole closing

RUTH MADIEVSKY is the author of a poetry collection, Emergency Brake (Tavern Books, 2016). Her work appears in The American Poetry Review, Tin House, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, Guernica, and elsewhere. She is a founding member of The Cheburashka Collective, a growing community of women and nonbinary writers whose identity has been shaped by immigration from the Soviet Union to the United States. Originally from Moldova, she lives in Boston, where she works as an HIV and oncology pharmacist. www.ruthmadievsky.com