Dream of a Bone Knife

In dreams a wilding creature gums a bone. Pooling around canid feet is rich broth like blood, wet bruising twigs and burying mice the way seracs drape alpinists in gravity. Animal presents bone. I accept. Zippered through with marrow it smells foreign, real, the bone acquires heavy size. Ballooning to the breadth of a bear, respirating like an angel went and lent it life’s iron compass. I hear it whistle, a bosun, this bone, cooing shiv of the wild, the animal creaks over, it gives up a ripe high belly seized with fate and ventricles. I want to own all the pelts in life, gain mastery. I climb the heaving to the heart and I look across the whited night and I bend my power back upon the sponged and cracked epiphysis and I assent to the vision of all things. Crying into ropey fur, I wake.

Seth Kleinschmidt

Seth Kleinschmidt is a Midwestern poet from the banks of Wisconsin's Rock River. A long-time radio producer and disc jockey, he is now an MFA candidate at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. His poetry appears or is forthcoming in Indiana Review, Columbia Review, Poetry Online, Passages North, Blue Earth Review, and other journals.