I use my hands to learn my creature, the shape of things
becoming. I petition her in flicks of the wrist. I ask the air
what might summon her. And I remember a woman pulling
the color red down a wall with her own two hands—her
desire drags earth-bound. I am building an alter to my
creature: the image of the woman smearing red down the
wall will entice her, show her I understand.

What else does she want? The answers come, pushed
through my fingers, a small, pulsing morse code: moss,
velvet, and old nylons, pulled in a tangle from someone
else’s trash, the feet dirty. She’ll like this. I’ll leave her a
book, too: it’s a book of magic, of cyborgs, the same book
that led me to the woman pulling red down a wall, it’s all in
there, this alter is growing with just the right mix.

I remember now, this same woman who made the book, she
asked me to lay down once, in the road, it was a shift-
change, I changed when I did it, everything shifted, just so,
with me, upon making her instruction. How this changed
me. The way the sky opened, vibrating the deepest blue,
until I atomized into it, a brief and gaping infinity inside the
morning twilight. Perhaps I will have to lay down for the
creature.

B. Metzger Sampson is a poet, essayist, and frequent collaborator with visual artists. She’s the Executive Director of the Chicago Poetry Center, which organizes roving readings across Chicago, with established and emerging writers, and hires poets as teaching artists for residencies in CPS. She was named one of NewCity’s “Lit 50 2017.” She previously founded and edited Dear Navigator, an electronic experimental literary magazine. Recent and forthcoming publications include interviews, essays, and poems, in Adroit Journal, Temporary Art Review, and at Poetryfoundation.org.

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