Communion
I’m a mosquito’s first choice—
in July dusk you can find me
scratching myself raw, using
my thumbnail to press a cross
into every soft welt.
But God made
these bugs too, and all
of us have to eat.
So every summer night, I bite
my tongue and spit all over
the porch rail
and once in a while
I let them sip straight
from my ankles and watch
as they grow full and dizzy
on me and the floodlights.
Hiwassee
Sunday evenings I wash the river
water from my hair.
The basin is dark with rust
but clean enough for me to swim in.
My body is grown now—the cigarette burns
on my palm stretch to fine white lines.
When asked, I blame a spider
I never saw. It crawled through
my window into my sleeping fist
and I held it close through the night.
Prairie Moon Dalton is an Appalachian poet. Her work has appeared in The Adroit Journal, Rattle, The Allegheny Review, and elsewhere. She is currently pursuing her MFA at North Carolina State University.