Four-Legged Girl

Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry

"Diane Seuss writes with the intensity of a soothsayer." —Laura Kasischke

For, having imagined your body one way I found it to be another way, it was yielding,

but only as the Destroying Angel mushroom yields, its softness allied

with its poison, and your legs were not petals or tendrils as I'd believed,

but brazen, the deviant tentacles beneath the underskirt of a secret queen

—f…