You climbed my body
like kudzu claiming
successive trees
slowly choking out
room for anything but
your own tepid
perpetuation. Pushing
further, deeper, wider
my leaves howled
for one final gasp of air
and you wonder
why a sapling shudders
when you whisper
her name.

Tamara Fricke is the 2010 co-winner of the Gertrude Claytor Award of the Academy of American Poets and is previously published by The Lyon Review, Meat for Tea, Attack Bear Press Poetry Vending Machine, Whisper and the Roar, We Will Not Be Silenced, and has been included in a number of compilations.  Her poetry chapbook Our Requiem was released in 2014.  She lives in Springfield, MA, with an ungrateful cat, where she writes grants professionally.