THE DRINKER

Her Hair Is Rhubarb

Her hair is rhubarb and so astringent that in my haste for a mouthful
we click our teeth together white as chalk and harder than Tali bone

She kneels on the cups of her knees and swallows the spit from the ball of
my tongue red as chokecherries and afterthoughts and her hair cut blunt

With her mother’s scissors the ones she uses for gutting chickens and hems and stitching nametags to collars and elastic waistbands that chaff hips raw

And she levers the skin from my eye with the skip of her tongue revealing grass-cut green and worm-wood brown and in my haste I swallow an oxen of

Bone where scissors shred the caulk of a jaw into rhubarb and the blackest black jujubes blacker than fish roe and harder than a juke knuckle and teeth

Cut crooked in the dorm of a mouth where her father’s black rage channels hatred and blackness black as worry and harder than Tali bone and colic

And I kiss her hair like rhubarb blunt cut with a mother’s haste to gut hems with scissors and chaff raw hips and chicken’s tongues hard as juke and spite

A grievous Injustice

A silage rat suckered underneath the porch
I caught the rope of it’s tail with the end of a stick

I used for ferreting out the mice and hedgehogs
That dug graves in the dirt behind the garden shed

(and caused my father such grievous injustice)
I spate its neck in like a heel of dry bread

And with the truck of my hands
Dug a grave for it in the dirt beside my father’s car

The car he used for joyriding and rousting the neighbors
(from the worry of their beds)

Chalk

I lie with the dogs
Up under the stoop

Of the house

In one cursed swoop (of)
The old crone’s hand

Skin and spine separate
Revealing bone and joint

Whiter than maggots
(and) chalk

Her Belt Buckle

Her belt
Buckle cut a groove

In the wainscoting of her hips
Where bone and denim

Cheat a hand out of raw
Dulcet skin

Her Dulse Lips

Her lips bled dulse
Like chokecherries

Griped in the palm
Of your hand

Her eyes bled cubeb
Like grapes

Stomped by the ungula
Of devils

Her hair bled yellow saffron
Like wheat chaff

Minced in the cogs
Of a thrasher

Her feet bled mucid wine
Like the Jehovah’s

Nailed to the cross
Of her memories

(not mine)

Her Teeth

She had no teeth to speak of
A no man’s land of fence stumps

And gate stiles

Earthen up after an august storm
Or a hard whack

To the mouth

Lead Pellets

Lead pellets
Cutting swaths of bone

Scud metal

Stitching shrapnel
To the stump of an arm

My Great Uncle

My great uncle stove the cow’s head in with the hammer he used
For knocking nails and shims into tracks of dry wood and posts

Its legs buckled under as the hammer hit bone gristle and skull
A popping sound issuing as the hammer swung quick then away

Its eyes went red then white then its shoulders slackened and fell
Then and one last snort of rye whiskey and Presbyter’s admixture

I closed my eyes as it fell tongue tacked to the chisel of its teeth and my Great uncle spitting whiskey and quid into the grain of the barn wood floor

Measured Steps

Scats and bone gathered
Where foot and clod

(meet the roof of hell)

Cloven and measured
On the ribcage of night

Measured in bone and scat
I feel the brine skinning

The Huns of my feet
Steps measured in clods

Spurs and rills of skin
Scuffing the roof of hell

(like devil’s feet)

Cloven and brined
Gathered in the clods

Of false prophets

Of A Face

My body has degenerated
To the point
Where self-recognition

Once a mirror image
Of a face
Is now a crude sketch

Another face within a face
A mouth within a mouth
Eyes that avoid eyes

That avoid the sketch
Of a face
Within a face

The crudeness of a face
Once a mirror image of youth
Of eyes and chin and nose

Now someone else’s
Some crude recognition
Of a face