A frog puts on her human skin and walks into a night club

at the magic hour when everyone is half-drunk.

If she can get anyone to kiss her,

she can stay human.

She doesn’t understand what makes a human

beautiful, wears too much moist-earth

perfume. The music doesn’t move her to dance.

Her human legs don’t have enough joints

for the dances she knows.

Her heart is missing a chamber

and everyone can sense it.

She doesn’t know why she wants

to be human until

I catch her eye in froggy reflection

in a hurricane glass, sip the space she leaves

on the lip of my drink, she transforms

the ice in my glass into a golden ball

she doesn’t ask me to define her allure

beckons me to the dance floor

with a flick of her tongue

___

JESSICA COLES (she/her) is a poet from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada (Treaty 6 territory), where she lives with her family and a judgmental tuxedo cat named Miss Bennet. Her work has appeared in Prairie Fire, Moist Poetry Journal, Crow Name, Capsule Stories, Full Mood Magazine, You are a Flower Growing off the Side of a Cliff (LCP Press chapbook), and CV2 (forthcoming). Her chapbook, unless you’re willing to evaporate, is available through Prairie Vixen Press.