Compliments to the Chef

About as hungry as a fire
without any place to go.
About as full as a trout hung
by its gills in the smokehouse,
guts left to bake in the sun like
canned cherries across the lawn.
About as beautiful as a sickled
fawn, a mountainside of trees
brown and crisp in a dry wind.

My hunger like the miles left to go.
Trees snap, listless in high wind.
And as unsightly as a crowd of
midges making a meal of scum,
flitting fruitful on the pond,
something becoming something
still permanent.

Jacob J Billingsley is a poet from the far interior of the North American continent, where they live with three wooden monkeys, a sacred ditch, and the bees that swarm the holly tree. More of his writing can be found in The Shore, ANMLY, and in Alocasia: 99 queer writers on plants and nature. His poem, “The Felled,” was featured on VerseDaily last May. Find him on Bluesky @jajobi, Facebook, or poetry Discord.