JAWS puff round AND SOLID as a TURNIP

Sluing Water and Salt

My mother used a vinegar
Bottle, bowsprit with holes

For sluing water and salt
Onto the handkerchiefs and socks

My father left in the cellar
In a cracker tin

Next to the furnace
And a canvas sac

Full of hockey pucks
And mice

Grandma’s Christmas Pie

Snow pale as death
Or like choking on a chicken bone

Left in the flinty crust
Of grandma’s Christmas pie

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

Lamb’s Tongue

She clapped her tongue against the thatch of my mouth, peeling the spice and salt from the Braille of my tongue

Lips skilled at alchemy, hex and thievery, a fate worse than oxen, hacked shoulder to breast knee cups slackening under joist and mallet, cumin-black

Tongue spiced with ox-brine, salt and slaver

Millet and Bone

Chaffing millet from bone
Gutters with ox mallets and pike

Separating skull from hank
The talisman, they say

Of an early March slaughter

Bridles of hair sheared white
Dunning axe and razor cut

Scalloped raw as chaff

Fratricide culls the bone
From chaff and marrow

Life takes root in mud
Not wine or dry biscuits

Millet and bone separated
From host and shoulder

The Talisman of a rising
Or an early spring slaughter