Haley Winans

Listen boo, I can’t stop thinking about that lace
lingerie of atmosphere draped over your thick

cloud-licking mountains, your sticky sap-lathered
trees. And you think my dick is pastoral,

ideal rural to rub your soft green
face on to forget the fuming smokestacks and domino

chains of dams that leave you wanting
nothing more than to spit out landslides

and swallow soot-wrapped cities. But I hope
you get that I only hit you

up when I’m horny and see a polar bear
clinging to an ice cube. You are just a voluptuous ball

of gas and dust with a sexy solid crust of curves, a body
that everyone calls home but treats like a landfill.

Author Bio

Haley is an art-hungry gardener from Annapolis, Maryland. She has poetry published in Slipstream, The Shore Poetry, Breakwater Review, Folio Literary Journal, and elsewhere. She is in the University of Memphis MFA Creative Writing program. She is a founding co-editor of Beaver Magazine, and Art Editor for the Pinch Journal. Her poems are heavily influenced by the intrinsic connections between humans and the environment; obsessed with inhabiting toxic patriarchal voices to satirize the societal systems that oppress the Earth. But sometimes she wakes up and needs to just wade in a pastoral. In her undergrad, she studied Environmental Studies and Creative Writing, with specific focuses on environmental justice, sustainable agriculture, and poetry.