it’s not that i believe refraining
from uttering the words
could tame them into being less
true, for their unspokenness

quaking in my limbs
is the summer breeze thrilling
amongst the ancient live oak’s
company of competing elbows—

such is my aching to give
motion & sound to the wild
silence that is their breath;

but that the voice of cannot—

murmuring its counsel like the wise
golden orb spider, who,
having commandeered the inside
expanse with her unseen intricacies,
now glistens a forbidding face
in the dawn’s sun-tinged tears—

is a constant
catching in my solar plexus…

silk-bound wingless, i am
suspended in space,
an opaquely trembling
notion of a self
inhabited too briefly,

yet, if i were to unhinge,
o, how i would
insinuate you whole
into my serpentine throat.

Stephanie L. Harper lives with her family in Hillsboro, OR. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee, and author of the chapbooks, This Being Done (Finishing Line Press) and The Death’s-Head’s Testament  (Main Street Rag, Spring 2019). Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Slippery Elm, Isacoustic, Panoply, Underfoot Poetry, Ristau: A Journal of Being, The High Window, and elsewhere.