No crabs walk sideways

when I take garbage out

to the large, metal cans

behind our kitchen, or I no

longer awake trundled from

my bedframe’s drawer; snack

kumquats so sour they sting

both cheeks; spend Sunday

mornings filling grocery bags

with red-veined sea grape

leaves veiling the patio’s

hot, concrete tiles my feet

have browsed since infancy,

so many states away--

            Florida

                        Illinois

                                    Kansas

                        Illinois

            Arizona

from a jalousied back door,

the creatures in between

       deer June bugs bunnies

       bats geese squirrels foxes

       raccoons wild turkeys

       coyotes hawks opposums

missing me back to sea

level, palmetto bugs inching

baseboards, frozen iguanas

plunging from royal palms,

sometimes I see them back-

stretched in the desert sun,

their green claws still yet

summoning, I feel like the only

non-prehistoric, as I cross

our cactussed yard, my feet

yielding to lawn mushrooms,

damp grass a canopy for my bike’s

metallic banana seat and rainbow,

handlebar streamers.

Amy Lerman lives with her husband and very spoiled cats in the Arizona desert where she is
residential English Faculty at Mesa Community College. Her chapbook, Orbital Debris (Choeofpleirn
Press, 2022) won the 2022 Jonathan Holden Poetry Chapbook Contest, she has been a Pushcart
nominee, and her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Book of Matches, The Madison Review,
Radar Poetry, Slippery Elm, Rattle, and other publications