Wicked
limbs hitch
like fifteen sets
of kinked fingers;
flex, ripple, and sink
in quick, cryptic synchrony.
It sits; it picks; it knits

its kinetic canticle

like a key that
cracks me
open.

I feel the
way it whispers,
skitters up the thin
skin at the back of my
neck, feel the prick as it
ripples in and sinks, clicking
like cracked knuckles, rattling
in my veins. It clings to my ventricles,
its almost liquid tick, tick, ticking, picking,
tickling, tricking the rhythmic music
of my autonomic system,
quickening me.
Sickening
me.

I

fall.

Look,
now i lie
fallow like the
unplowed ground
and it hovers, invisible
and vivid. At my aorta, it sits.
It is shadow, still, silent, cinching
up the hush to slip around itself.
it settles down, soundless,
a texture, undetectable
and low, crouching in
the slow opening
And closing,

Daring
me to
rise.

Elise is a liberal back-woods bootlegger and an artisanal vegan cheese-maker. They write from their lived experiences of fat-positivity, queerness, disability, mental illness, and moving through carnivorous shadows. Elise’s life has been an adventure, from facilitating equine therapy for trauma survivors to counseling at-risk youth with the aid of an inordinately large sub-woofer and beyond. They earned their bachelor’s degree from Mount Holyoke and their Master’s from Capella University. Elise is a full-time writer/mom in Connecticut, where they live with one tiny daughter and over three hundred pounds of fur-family. Their poetry has appeared in the literary journal High Shelf.