ORGANIZED DERISION

Clod Between the Weal

And her hair black as a murder of crows cutting into the sway of my hips moving inward then out trying to echo the suckle of her mouth coaxing a stiffening in the (Valhalla) the Norse clod

between the weal of my legs gone numb and unresponsive to touch and tongue and crows feathers

In The Barrows of Her Skirt

She mulled apples rotting in the barrows of her skirt where she kept her keepsakes a bird’s shell and a heel of dry hard bread she pilfered from the baker’s when his back (was front) to her

and smoke quailed his eyes with bad thoughts of his wife’s paps hung like dead men his fingers disjointed and garroting the peril of her neck his cock roan and trill abrading the stock of his leg

where rickets and jackdaws fraught skin from hollow and she thought if only she could barter and haggle with him (or his wife or the church) or a merchant with stock in trade and an

abrasion in the scuttle of his trousers hemmed and rosined with haberdasher’s chalk and apple sculls rotting in the hammock of her skirts where blood and thumbprints left they’re mark not a

sparrow but a pharaoh or a pariah or a hack of dry hard bread

Roofer’s Tar

Cheeks roved and blackened like roofer’s tar and vicarage with (tannic) breath and stiff collar gods’ will for (this is not the best of all possible worlds) the one yet to come on the hackle of

buggers and Nauru do wells eyes tallow with specters and devil’s tongues happing ciborium red-wine and there is nothing baroque about scurvy no lime or quinine could possibly forge proper

yet rectors offer up a bitter-lye host to those willing to forego assonance at the expense of a supplicants harrow and lops of hair tonsured round skullcap (Siren’s ears) stoked with paraffin

scriptures squid black with The Word and you crook-kneed and elbow-backed like a calf lolling saltlick and foot