The Food Chain by Morouje Sherif (15, Canada)

CARNIVORA

Predators don’t come around to show
you silver cutlery for your eyes, lend
you milk. I am ten years old when I
review nonchalant anatomy until
I’m fluent.

---

Take the enclosure like a glass of egg.
This is my mouth, furnished with new bone.
This is the hacienda between my thighs,
preparing to fold limbs from arches
and new eyes from the collage of moon.
I work on saying no for years, this
word can refract around the shell of
an ear for years.
This word is a bridge in
a woman’s mouth, spliced
with mist.

​PREDATORIA
​
You name every rifle in your father’s
hunting cabinet another synonym
for escape. This crevasse, a rite of
passage: your hands trembling
in unknowns, exquisitely to reign
& freezing in the dark. Sometimes
in a city drowning in the dusk,
your mother tries to shape your sorrow
into something she can blame herself for.
By the side of a road, a dead man promises
his children that tomorrow he will wake
from hibernation.
The precise moment it comes, you are infinity
within creased knuckles, breastbone from a
body that is not yours—or one that was,
until you traded it for the memory of incandescence.
Listen: every deer in this forest is learning the sound
of anguish. Tomatoes wither, roses grimace. Listen:
the moon rises so loud in the sky (turns black in fear).
In some other version of this night, your body knows
all the places it has not yet been.
Perhaps one day you will relearn the art of
inhaling, but today is not that day. Instead there
is only your father's cabinet, somehow swinging open.
Mouth lifting, soulless, toothless as so many rifles
swimming helpless of humour in their trapped
jawbone.