Think feeding, from your wet mouth. Drink from the cistern underground. Reach down through mineral earth with its fragrance of milk thistle, rust, lilacs and lilies. Think feeding. Open the shell, breathe into the mollusk inside. Read its library of muscle memory. Breathe it young again. Think feeding. Dust your tongue with manic glitter. Lick life’s lather— sweet foam whipped up from the wings of hummingbirds. Think feeding, fleshy fruit like the Medjool date— a stone fruit, plump tender nutritious.
BIO: Anna Mae Perillo is a poet, novelist and playwright. Her first Chapbook, Inheritance of Courage and Fear, published by Finishing Line Press was released in October 2020. Her poem “Nest of Worries” was published in Volume V of Contraposition Literary Journal. Porcelain, Anna Mae’s first novel is in the final stages of editing. Her play, Marianna and the Wild Boars, was accepted for production by the Manhattan Repertory Theater with 2020 shows being rescheduled for 2021 due to the Pandemic. She is a lawyer and mediator in Red Bank, New Jersey with 90% of her practice devoted to peaceful resolution, a wife and mother of two grown children. Anna Mae’s poem “A Boy Lying Listless Against a Wall on a New York City Sidewalk” has been nominated by Finishing Line Press for a 2021 Pushcart Prize.