Gourmand

I tasted each inch of the earth.I did not like it but I did it.There were extravagant flavors, Gobi, Horse Track, Lava Field, London . . .People saw a starving criminaland mildly kicked me, or flicked me crumbs,while I etched a new map of the worldinside my roving mouth.Soon Sweet, Acrid, and their family failed.When my tongue hardened it discoveredspecimens of No persistenteverywhere. In the tang of sunriseor populous night; on footprints, scurried;stable, through the caterwauling clay: No._____Stephen Sturgeon is the editor of Fulcrum: an Annual of Poetry and Aesthetics. His first collection of poems, Trees of the Twentieth Century, will be published by Dark Sky Books in the coming months.