Member-only story
Suck Out the Venom
Nov 12, 2020
In Hawaii, I kept a child gecko
with big toes in a Styrofoam cup,
watching its tongue flick for absent
water. He’s a legend — that gecko —
dying later inside the outgassing white,
rendered still as a sunflower seed,
cracked and spit on the ground
where I watched the red ants overpower
the brown scorpions in the parking garage;
the same scorpions that paraded through
stalls on the beach where I pulled my
skinning legs high off the floor, praying
they were all blind and overwhelmed,
stinging each other with violent language
like the murder bees and the jellyfish
and the flag-wavers.
© Trapper Markelz 2020
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