Volta

Venus & Vulcan
warn me in summer. You
are cloven into boy-seasons:
Ferdinand & Atum.

Sometimes you strike
a buried wire &
a hollow sound
warps the earth
until I am buzzing like a hive.

A cascade of bells hung
by an errant efeblum, clangs
distantly like a dumbwaiter.

I am walking at night now,
thinking of you.

Kneeling, panting,
circling like a wraith
the razed chicken
coop at the high school.

Eleven sets of fingers
hold me down in anguish,
twenty-nine tongues—
my mind is elsewhere.

The male E. voltai
is an electric eel with
a max voltage
of 860 v’s.

It guards its larvae
with saliva, salting the perimeter
like a pagan circle.

We know its infant
elvers to be flat
and diaphanous–
little paper slivers soaked
in sea water.

The slicing wave. The
eye-sized ampule
of its incandescence.

The cloak
& dagger of
reproduction. The
tin can telephone
of our bodies.

Hayley Trussell is a poet and researcher from Indianapolis, IN. Her work has most recently appeared in Vector. She is currently working on a chapbook with her partner.