The tradition of sausage making required the meat grinder.
The crunch of the crank. A long lever
with an almost shine to it. An animal stacked on the counter,
bleeding. Room temperature.
A bowl of red spices. It’s the only difference
between us and other beasts.
Mother feeds the machine. I sit on linoleum and sip bird’s milk
out of a small, chipped mug.
I watch the blood leak through the seams of the shanty kitchen,
down the wooden paneling, warm.
I feel as if it were my own blood. I taste it.
I can’t stop chewing the inside of my cheeks.
Pink and festered. We sing through bells.
It’s almost Christmas. The smell of garlic enters
and we are on the verge of prayer
when it begins to scream and gurgle and scream again.…
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In the Smoky Mountains, Tennessee
The license plates line up
in the gravel parking lot of Clingman’s Dome.
The fathers step out, groan, and unfold.
The children crack the road-trip hull
and their mothers do not scold.
The blue fog
of the Smoky Mountains brings them here.
A Cherokee curiosity,
the Shaconage. That sky-colored smoke
is sacred to the dead. The tourists tromp
to sunrise, and disappear—
and now it’s night.
The locusts boil under my feet.
They feed on chalky deer minds, skulls beneath
more skulls, from a thousand hunts
once holy. The topsoil turns
in the larvae-heating roil.…
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Mama, you’ve been in this bed—
the covers molding to your chin—for weeks
and brother wants a bottle but I can’t
reach the cups and your face flushes when
I stand on the kitchen counter
and your tears are up to the ceiling
and I don’t want to drown.
Papa has left again with the wallet
from your purse and the last-standing
television and I’ve wept for weeks
and can’t swallow anymore. And I
wonder if the ceiling changes the longer
you stare at it—if you’re lifting yourself
up and out from here, far over
the broken furnace, the empty fridge,
the pawnshop wedding rings and into
a city where the sun always hits the backs
of your arms, transforms you
into someone worth saving, a golden girl. …
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………….The firewood we can point to is consumed. That’s how the flame passes
………….on. And who knows where it all ends?
………….—Zhuangzi III, 6
…………..In the back, Archaeopteryx
…………..hangs, limestone relief in half-darkness,
Her cervical vertebrae bent backward,
……………………….she remains inert,
…………..a shepherd’s crook to the coming birds:
…………..feathers with sauroid claws, she blurred
the furcula in her breathwhile, as if Darwin
……………………….had drawn her from afar.
…………..Should I swallow my breath in this
…………..monster graveyard? Do her bones miss
flesh wrapping them like gifts? Does the air lay
……………………….lazily on her ribs
…………..to hear heartbeats?—All this flux froze
…………..for a moment as keen genes honed
transposons: fire, form and not, whipping up
……………………….…
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This train has a lavatory like an airplane
and uniformed women in red tunics serve
snacks and beer. I close my eyes
and think of those boyhood subway rides
through the Bronx. My father jumped the turnstile
and told me to crawl underneath
so we could save the 50-cent fare.
I couldn’t wait to be tall like my father and hurl
myself over the turnstile, a sort of working-class
Olympic event. The turnstiles are different
today, more like revolving doors
with fortified steel gates. My father and his New York
are long gone, lost to America’s restless rusting.
My father never left the U.S., even when he served
in the Army. With my eyes still closed I see
him sitting beside me now: on a high-speed train
pumping through the veins of our Italian
homeland with my wife, who sips a Prosecco
and me a Peroni while I read Richard Blanco,
and I hear my father’s voice asking not how we paid
our fare but, rather, if.…
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and on the days when I miss you / the night is blanked black / all I have to keep me company are the not-quite-strangers performing their selves online / no stars / so strange that I know their favourite sex toy and their grandmother’s maiden name / to misunderstand laughter / and no notion of their faces animated by words / are they satellites / we collide mouths from a distance / I am there but not really / honey, cooled by winter, stuck to the plastic / I remember the way your hair avoided the parting and just flopped over your face / you read the poem aloud in the translated French / a lift-off / to be kissed by curls / tonight the moon stands as absence / cobbled by tenderness / and I slaughter myself to remake one memory
– SK Grout…
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“If I open the door he’ll flash and fade
like heat lightning behind a bank of clouds
one summer night at the edge of the world.”
—Mark Bibbins
All the men finally died, and that
was a wonderful thing. I knew
exactly where it would happen:
the beds they never slept in. Their legs
gliding like gazelles, their arms
by their sides, then on their knees.
They were all equestrian-themed,
unicorn stamps on their hands
that never washed off and too much
tequila. All the men said their love
swelled, in piles of wolf pictures
never hung, and they waited
for more secrets. They imagined
themselves as hidden artifacts,
either sacred or tired of humanity.
When they died, thousands of purple
flower buds opened at the base
of a mountain and said thank you.…
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