Tag: Bloodmeal

ONE ART’s 2023 Best of the Net nominations

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ONE ART is pleased to announce this year’s Best of the Net nominations!

Eligible poems were published between July 1, 2021 and June 30, 2022. As a poetry journal, we had the opportunity to nominate six poems.

The nominated poems (in no particular order) are as follows:

Ona Gritz – Dear Advice Columnist
CL Bledsoe – Working from Home
Whitney Hudak – ISLAMORADA
Donna Spruijt-Metz – Sarah Returns to Me as a 100% Organic Cotton Round
Kaitlyn Spees – Bloodmeal
Claire Taylor – Here Lies a Woman

Thank you for these poems!

Bloodmeal by Kaitlyn Spees

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Bloodmeal

Sometimes I let the mosquito do her thing –
Watch her little body fat with blood and ignore
The itch of her mouthparts parting her chosen
Point of skin. My mammal heart
Pumps iron to bulge her bugbelly quickly –
In both our interests – she seems to take
So little for satisfaction that it feels
Churlish to refuse. For me it’s easy: my
Mosquitos are clean so far my fluid-swap welts
Fade fast I’m lucky and I like pain.
I think about my blood transmuted
To eggs, then larva, then winged legions.
I think it when I sip, like a hummingbird germophobe,
Christ’s blood from the chalice. I think it
When I bleed between my legs.

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Kaitlyn Spees is a Bay Area poet and technician in a genetics lab. Her work has appeared in Rattle Magazine’s Poets Respond and The Herd Literary Newsletter.