Throat Nonpareil

---

an egg in my chest
makes it hard to swallow to speak
so I rest
the breath of a doe rising
to my eyes flooding when I feel
the cracking another song hatching
wilder numinous the yolk drips
bloody like honey tangled roots
bones caressed to vibrato
my pelvis hums the mockingbird
between my legs awake feathers
aflame and sharp eggshell fluttering
I shake
wings beating at the roof of my mouth
I gag
surrender all the symphony’s strings
my lungs my singed tongue
to birth a better instrument of my being

---

Melissa King (she/her), PhD, is an anthropologist, educator, and poet whose work centers on relationality, kinship with the natural world, and contemplative inquiry. She serves as Faculty Chair and Professor of Anthropology and Global Studies at San Bernardino Valley College in Southern California and has worked as an educator for twenty-five years. She began writing poetry during ethnographic fieldwork and fell in love with the form as a way to listen, witness, and reimagine. Poetry allows her to be beyond herself, entangled in intersubjectivities and partial knowings. You can find her typing in view of Cucamonga and Ontario Peaks, considering the wildness of her pet cat and the fern on the patio.