I am a sun-drenched willow field withered and
purple. Headache remiss, wonder when the liver
will churn its nightly clarion call, squeezing rags
to drag the water out.
Sometimes the nights are like that in the silence
between friends. The drafts replace talking.
You can’t hear the words with breath so still
and distant, willows soon awakening.
(originally published in Transcendence Magazine, Summer 2016)
The turkey was sacrificial. We dug
our fingers through dark meat
to retrieve the stuffing but avoided
the controversial topics, the fat on our bones.
What bubbled was the broth, salt
on stone, and Mom drank sparkling
juice cocktails, pretended it was wine–
laughter compressed from the mash
in our mouths, the soft chew and gravy.
How simple it would be to spill grease
from the pan over the tablecloth, so temporary–
ten years ago was the last we all celebrated,
the last our talking bounced from mouths,
caught softly in our ears. After the funeral
we peeled grapefruit. Its rotting meat
blessed a white plate for days after the feast,
when we gorged enough of ourselves
to ask what it is about the lumps in apple pie
we savor, when the tartness
burrows new holes in our teeth–
maybe it’s the cutting, dulled knife on pie,
and the serving– one piece on porcelain,
a fragment, a memory
of what it means to be whole.
(originally published in Jazz Cigarette, Fall 2016)
Gruesome scarecrow bore into me, wicked carrot limbs, dried snowman. This farm is seeped with the blood of the farmers but the cows are all right. Have you seen a cow’s smile? It crumples the yellow Mississippi into a zagged horseshoe. Forever we’ll remember the first game we played. The hoof felt like hardened slabs of discount deli turkey, art deco. No one won. No one is winning. The larger the city, the truer this fact. You can almost feel the weight of a tower’s collapse in its shadow, bogged shirt. Hemp gravel lines. I see the kinetic potential of kindergarten, a kinder garden than which you cribbed your tomatoes in, so stabbed by the wanderlust deer. We dug those tiny crevices with conveyor shovels. Wickets, wickets, and did the terrain ever grow out of itself like the work of man– ah, did it ever.
(originally published in Ping Pong, October 2015)