come tuesday with its rinds scooped out,
and your wrist’s bent in that awful bend
that almost betrays
you’ve learned to ride your horse
just yesterday.
we’d come home,
that good coin face
left to rot,
and find the windows
turned into mirrors;
all our good women
brushing up their
reds and blues,
looking past the willows into
the weeping face
of the future—
perhaps the nameless
leash of the past,
yanking us straight
to dinner,
straightened
from the bend of
questioning figures.
we’d eat the burnt stew
and caress our knuckles,
wonder how bad they’d burn
over the fire,
how well they’d taste
in the soup.
night wasn’t quiet,
but it was a near thing.
some mornings,
brewing coffee, we’d vote for
the best dream to die in
and you’d say no, it can’t happen
like that,
she wouldn’t let us be asleep.
and either way,
no ground we know would take us,
not with this malignant bone
stretching us out—
our final thump should be
the loudest of all.
it’s a tax, a toll,
we better pay it what it’s owed.
months later,
when they asked me what i thought
of the woman with a shotgun mouth
opening her stomach,
i would say,
i’m still not sure it was her
at all.
but even after
she was in the ground,
i reckon we felt it,
or at least figured
that
that cavernous wound
was a good
place to stash in
our dead years
as any.
(silent as an absence,
that thump,
though the noise
would scare us later.)
on that fancy ruin of
balcony,
you’d say,
there’s only so many
miracles we can witness
before they all get their teeth
knocked out—
and our father would say,
teeth or no teeth,
you’ll still be here
come tomorrow.
we’d spent weeks
waiting to be found,
be it
by his glazing stare
or the conspicuous barrel
of the law.
we’d spent weeks
checking the miracles
for teeth.
at the end there,
when the thunder hammered
its tongue home,
we had left the mouth
elsewhere, alone.
inside,
the light went long like a claw,
the furniture retreated,
and the house spit out
its eyes.
at the end there,
wicked bone
protruding and
flesh picked out of the
corpse,
there
would only be the
windows searching for
songs.
inside, the
handwriting of
someone you had known—
voice imprinted in
paper, sealed and gone.
outside,
the belly bump of the mud,
fed on shadows, fed on ghosts.
