Sourdough
My hands heave with microcosmosis.
Under my nails a miniscule municipality
with pink glass dome, chipped.
There is discontent amongst the denizens.
Lactobacilli line up throw bottles of urine at Candida
eat each other down dark passages licking juicy lips
snap their fingers in syncopation sing about migration until one pulls a knife
guts the other conduct themselves
in violet camouflage and luminescent tin hats.
Their rage is suggested through my ring finger tingle but
I’m too busy singing reggae to notice;
this lack of vigilance will one day cost me.
I chew on my tip, recalling
the time in seventh grade my period bled through white jeans
Swallow the city whole
Karen Morash is a playwright and poet from Nova Scotia, now living in the UK. Her writing has received prizes and been published in Songs of Love & Strength; Live Canon Anthology 2019 and 2018; Room; Understorey; Literary Mama; Sentinel Literary Quarterly; Bare Fiction; and QWF, amongst others. She received a PhD from Goldsmiths in 2018, a practice as research dissertation looking at the role of playwrights in devising, and is Lead Academic Tutor on the BA Theatre Studies at Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance.