Lisa Favicchia is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Kansas and is the Assistant Poetry Editor of LandLocked. Her work has appeared in Peregrine Journal, Midwestern Gothic, and Glass: A Journal of Poetry, among others.
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Developing Trypophobia as a Result of Defining Trypophobia
There are worse things than burying
hundreds of yourselves in your own back
hoping you will leave yourself
better and un-pocked, gape-holed
and freely accepting water
like a breeze, or like the lotus pod
and its dry, empty rattle
raspy and symptomatic
of respiratory infection
or the bottoms of cookies
bubble-puckered. It’s a cricket
swallowing its young, its own
feet, all the way up
to its head where mandibles try
to mimic a mouth
and you’re surprised it can’t
actually make sound, confused
by something that would seek
to be lip and less alien
when you had tried so hard
to make yourself that angular
—it’s this mouth
that deprives you of sleep,
a hyper-awareness of holes
as something to crawl into
that makes you draw covers
up at night with the faintest sound
of scratching, imagining
the ghosts of tiny feet
circling the rim of your ear.
**
A Genealogy of Leaves
My grandmother’s hair was black
polished on brass door knobs,
glass and smooth.
That was when I ran
my hair under faucets
and through the rusted teeth
of combs or tree bark ash.
Black black swamp leaves
could never steep
long enough to leave
my eyes in a retinal burn
of tea-stained iris.
This is a piney matter,
frail hands over stomachs, etc.
Backwater billows
of murk don’t cry
about being unclear—
the certainty in pads
of molting leaf
is nothing like the mint-
white bone, a collar
bone, nothing like red,
and especially not the good
three-pronged forks.
*
ISACOUSTIC* 