Mouth Honor, and: Baba Yaga

68 Five male crickets sing and fight. The loudest wins, the softest dies, the neither-nors fill the air with mediocre fluff. The champion thug’s shell’s so hard, his chirp, his sword, his perfect yell. The loser rots, the sweet black gore of cricket joy expressed to death in one dumb glop. But what if not? What if “loser” sent a message out to the female cricket beds—that sounder eggs are made of sounds that no one sane can guess, and now the meadow’s pregnant with the contents Two poems by larissa szporluk MouthHonor 69 of his head—the treacle of his refusal to be anybody else, which manifests in darkness as a silence that is tense, so when they’re born, they scream like snow that falls against itself. 70 Baba Yaga I cooked my little children in the sun. I threw grass on them and then they died. I sit here now and wonder what I’ve done. Death is but a heap of dried-up dolphins whose fleshy leap and shine we can’t imagine. That’s why I get back to work and listen to my clock and not my mind. Wisdom ticks against the wise man who tries to teach the wicked to be kind (but my eyes are holes and his old breath just whistles through the sagebrush in my garden). The only seed with stamina is time. Evening’s climbing down into the cauldron, then rising in the steam that fills my nose. Ticking, tocking, that’s all I put my faith in. It’s no different to be lilies-of-the-valley and rub a human ankle with a fragrance than to be the flaky thing that turns it cold, no different to have ridden silver waves than be the one to break them—babies, babies, looking at the sky with so much love. As I bent to light your toes, the second split and I was witch but still your mother. ...