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Kayla Greer Poem
Windfalls,
bruised gold splitting,
their sweet rot perfumes the mouth
of earth. I breathe the death that feeds
new life.
Copyright © Kayla Greer | Year Posted 2025
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Kayla Greer Poem
I swallow the living grey flesh whole,
its salt-slick body
sliding down my throat like a small death
I chose to welcome.
The shell cracked open,
exposed—
raw.
Copyright © Kayla Greer | Year Posted 2025
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Kayla Greer Poem
The saints were never in the churches.
They were at the register, sliding cans of beans
across the scanner, bagging bread with hands
that understood: this is the body, broken.
Every grocery store is temple.
Every act of feeding, eucharist.
The woman counting coins for milk—
she’s performing ritual older than cathedrals,
the magic of turning money into nourishment,
the alchemy of caring whether strangers eat.
Watch the stockboy stacking oranges at dawn—
he’s building altars to vitamin C,
arranging offerings in pyramids of citrus light.
His minimum wage is tithing.
His sore back, genuflection.
The mystics know: God lives in aisle five
between the pasta and the tomato sauce,
in the exact moment someone puts back the name-brand
to afford the generic, then uses those two dollars
to buy formula for a neighbor’s baby.
This is transubstantiation—
flour and yeast becoming bread becoming life.
This is the miracle they forgot to write down:
one person handing another the means to continue,
the small combustion of kindness
that keeps the species burning.
The checkout girl who doesn’t question
the food stamp card, who smiles and says
have a good day and means it—
she’s practicing resurrection.
Communion was never about the wafer.
It was always about the passing,
hand to hand, the breaking open
of what sustains us, the sharing of it,
the quiet insistence that no one
should have to starve alone.
The mystics knew this in their caves and deserts:
that holiness is feeding your enemy,
that prayer is checking on the elderly neighbor,
that the sacred text is written in receipts
for soup kitchens, in the ledger where the grocer
marks paid beside the name of someone
who couldn’t pay.
I’ve read the scriptures.
They all say the same thing
in different robes and languages:
feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty,
clothe the naked, shelter the homeless—
not because some god commanded it
but because we are the gods
and this is how divinity manifests:
in the handing over of an apple,
in the sharing of salt,
in the moment someone puts groceries
in another’s cart and walks away
before thank you catches up.
The mystics lived on nothing,
gave away everything,
and learned what the rest of us
keep forgetting:
that every meal is sacrament,
every hunger met is prayer answered,
every act of feeding is the closest we get
to what we’ve been calling holy
all along.
Copyright © Kayla Greer | Year Posted 2025
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Kayla Greer Poem
The black cat was a mercy I couldn’t give.
Two years she reached through bars
with patient claws, marking
each white feather dark, each bright day
bruised. The cage held dying, not living—
thin wires promising safety
while offering only delay.
I watched her practice
on all four, teaching me
what love looks like
when it can’t protect:
a slow scratching toward the inevitable,
wings beating against their own bones,
song turning to the small sounds
prey makes when mercy
wears a black coat and will not hurry.
The fourth one taught me this—
that sometimes the killer
is kinder than the keeper,
that claws are cleaner
than the prolonged kindness of bars,
that the hand that built the cage
holds more blood than the mouth
that finally opened it.
Copyright © Kayla Greer | Year Posted 2025
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Kayla Greer Poem
The kitchen knives sing sweetly in their block,
each blade a promise, silver-sharp and clean.
I slice the onions. How the housewives mock.
The cutting board bears every daily shock—
potatoes, carrots, flesh that’s never seen.
The kitchen knives sing sweetly in their block.
My mother wound her life around the clock,
her hands performing tasks both sharp and mean.
I slice the onions. How the housewives mock.
The gleaming steel, the drawer I dare not unlock,
these edges know what I have never been.
The kitchen knives sing sweetly in their block.
Each dinner calls for blood, demands I stock
the table with my hours, carved and keen.
I slice the onions. How the housewives mock.
The blade that feeds can also cut and shock—
this double life, this edge between, between.
The kitchen knives sing sweetly in their block.
I slice the onions. How the housewives mock.
Copyright © Kayla Greer | Year Posted 2025
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Kayla Greer Poem
The Mycorrhizal Network
“Flowers fade and decay through wintry hours—waiting for rebirth.”
Beneath the forest’s separate skin,
white threads connect each breathing thing—
fungal highways no eye can witness,
trading sugar for rain.
The Douglas fir feeds the hemlock
when shade has stolen all its sun,
carbon passed from root to root like gossip,
like care without a name.
The mother tree knows when her seedlings starve
and sends them what they need to live—
nutrients flowing through the dark communion
that makes the forest one.
This is the conversation
we mistake for silence up above:
ten thousand root-tips touching, speaking
in the syntax of soil.
When the chainsaw bites through bark and wood,
the network feels the amputation,
chemical alarms flood through the mycelium—
warning: something cuts, something dies.
Copyright © Kayla Greer | Year Posted 2025
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Kayla Greer Poem
I built my fortress out of counting—
fourteen hundred twenty ways to say I’m safe.
The light switch: off, on, off again, again.
The stove knobs all aligned at six o’clock.
My hands know every doorknob’s texture, how
the deadbolt clicks when turned exactly twice.
I check the rearview mirror: once for cars,
and once for certainty, and once for luck.
The numbers line up clean as soldiers, march
in formation through my racing thoughts.
If I can just complete the sequence, then—
but there’s no then. There’s only one more check,
one more loop around the house at night,
one more time washing my already clean hands.
I know the math is wrong—this isn’t safety,
just arithmetic I use to build my cage.????????????????
Copyright © Kayla Greer | Year Posted 2025
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Kayla Greer Poem
At three, the garden writes itself in slime—
silver calligraphy across the flagstones
where I pace in my wool habit, sweating.
The moths are frantic priests
hurling their small bodies at the lamp’s false sun,
again, again, a liturgy of burning.
I used to call this Devil’s hour.
Now I know there is no Devil,
only the slug’s blind pull toward rot,
the cartography of appetite
mapped in mucus on the path
where saints once walked to Matins.
The hostas are being eaten.
Something is always eating.
I watch a moth singe its wing-dust on the bulb—
that powdery baptism, useless—
and drop stunned to the stones
where a slug begins its pilgrimage across the corpse.
This is the only honest prayer:
mandibles working in darkness,
the chemical shimmer of a slug’s foot
seeking the soft meat of decay.
No one is listening. No one was ever listening.
The garden teaches me its single lesson—
matter consuming matter,
the world folding into itself
like hands at vespers, purposeless,
perfect. The moths know
what I am only learning:
light is not love. Light is just light,
and we are who burn for.
Copyright © Kayla Greer | Year Posted 2025
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Kayla Greer Poem
I started young, laying brick on brick—
each anxiety a stone I mortared into place.
By twelve, the walls were thick enough
to keep out compliments, to muffle praise.
The moat I dug with my own hands,
filled it with every worst-case scene:
the car crash, the missed deadline, the test
I’d fail despite knowing every answer clean.
I raised the drawbridge for anyone
who got too close, who saw the turrets
for what they were—not protection
but a prison I’d designed with such care
the architect and prisoner were the same.
Now I stand on the highest tower,
looking down at the life outside these walls,
the one I could have lived
if I hadn’t been so good at building,
if I hadn’t made this fortress so complete
that even I can’t find the door,
can’t remember which stone was the first I laid.????????????????
Copyright © Kayla Greer | Year Posted 2025
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Kayla Greer Poem
Black heat rising in steam,
bitter prophet of dawn’s claim.
You burn my tongue awake,
shake sleep’s ash from my veins.
Small god in a white cup—
I drink you down like truth,
dark and necessary.
Copyright © Kayla Greer | Year Posted 2025
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