kitten

Scott-Patrick Mitchell

musk deepening
age hardens the bean
with each wall scaled

a noisy ascension 
graceless 
as if to announce 

a bell trails

at night, this is a herald
as is the door, knocking
a loose tooth in jamb

incremental, growth 
stretches across made beds
strand by strand, shedding

how want makes a body
liquid, rivering shin:
prelude to hunger’s flood

in the dark, landscape 
warms landscape, small 
& curved, kinship unspoken
in a green field of vision 
lidded with thunder, approaching

Scott-Patrick Mitchell (SPM) is a non-binary poet who lives as a guest on Whadjuk Noongar Land. In 2019, they won MPU’s Martin Downey Urban Realist Poetry Award and The Wollongong Short Story Prize. SPM was recently shortlisted for The International Googie Goer Prize for Speculative Prose and the 2020 and 2021 Red Room Poetry Fellowship. Scott-Patrick’s debut collection, Clean, will be released early 2022.