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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 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 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
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
They said I was too much of night,
too shadowed, dense, and undefined,
as if my darkness dimmed their light—
but they were cosmically blind:
the void is where the stars are signed.
I claim my kinship with the black
that holds a thousand galaxies,
the velvet background, deep and slack,
that makes each burning point a key—
without me, what would bright things be?
The Hubble aimed where nothing showed,
where emptiness seemed absolute,
and found that darkness overflowed
with ancient light en route—
I am the fertile, the hirsute.
They wanted me diluted, bland,
a paleness easy on the eye,
but I’m the space that helps stars stand,
the contrast painting sky—
the canvas every light needs by.
So let them flinch from what I hold:
this body born of cosmic dust,
this skin like space, alive and old,
this darkness they’ve discussed—
I am the frame that beauty must.
Look long enough into my empty—
you’ll see I’m full of galaxies.
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
What the pavement remembers about want
Lamplight splits itself between them—
his back, her bouquet, the space
where decision hasn’t hardened yet.
Rain makes the cobblestones honest:
every surface becomes mirror, becomes
what it reflects. The flowers
are already dying. She holds them
like a argument for something.
Behind him, the city offers
its wet mouth of windows, open.
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
The dress was going to be yellow—
sunflower yellow, the kind that hurts to look at
in full light, which we hadn’t had in months anyway,
just the gray sift of dust through shattered windows
and the orange pulse when the sky opened its mouth.
She would have been eight.
Eight candles we couldn’t buy, couldn’t light
even if we had them. The power died in March
and took with it the oven, the mixer, the bright hum
of anything working the way it should.
I had saved the flour. Hidden it
like contraband, like hope—
three cups in a plastic bag
behind the loose tile in the kitchen
that no longer had a kitchen attached.
The cake would have been chocolate.
She asked for chocolate every year,
and every year I made vanilla because it was cheaper,
promising next time, habibi, next time—
and she believed me because she was seven, then six, then five,
and children believe their mothers
until the moment they learn not to.
The game was going to be musical chairs.
Ridiculous. As if we had music. As if we had chairs.
As if eight children could gather in one place
without someone calculating the efficiency
of the target, the value of the payload,
the acceptable margin of small bones.
I found one candle yesterday.
White. Thin. Half-melted from the heat.
I don’t know why I picked it up,
why I put it in my pocket like a relic,
like something that still meant birthday
and not just another way to mark
what didn’t happen.
She would have blown it out.
Made a wish. The wish would have been
something possible in her world—
a new doll, a book, a day at the beach
before she learned that the beach was closed,
that the sea doesn’t want us anymore,
that wanting itself is a luxury
distributed unevenly.
I lit the candle last night.
Just to see. Just to remember what it meant
to have a small flame and a reason for it.
It burned for twenty minutes before the wind
took it, and I sat in the dark
singing happy birthday to the space
where eight years old should have been,
where the yellow dress should have twirled,
where chocolate should have smudged her smile,
where she should have cheated at musical chairs
and laughed when I pretended not to notice—
but the dark doesn’t answer,
and the candle is out,
and eight is just a number now,
a countable thing,
a cake that was never baked,
a girl who will never be nine.
Copyright © Kayla Greer | Year Posted 2025
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