Published in The Slanted House, 2018
Wavering in bleached cotton,
thin-skinned muscle-twitches
ring out their juices
through faded eye-sockets
in the sticky not-so-supple air
drenched with night-colors.
The same-sex sinners
arrive
pregnant minds lay their anchors elsewhere
and so,
we reel them in with calloused hands
into tumultuous shores of
shallow depth.
Their bunkers we line with crucified forms,
their thoughts we line with formless crucifixions
for we are givers.
Rumbling engines, open-mouth
grating,
a Ford f-150 and a no-name Chevy
for the children whose names
their parents held hostage
to suffer a foreign soil
unrooted.
Uprooted,
a blazing summer to scald the skin
with sentimental falsehoods.
The first week watched their wandering
minds chained into places
made for the well-made
man-made
man.
I fear they might gently brush against me
on a walk to a smoldering fire pit
we take
WE TAKE
we take.
Lest I catch that unnatural ill
nature gave them
gifts
we unwrap like greedy children,
crinkled aluminum paper caught in between stubby, stubborn, fatty fingers
we wash like less than Pontius Pilot.
Singing in an unconnected circle,
cramped bodies squeeze out little
syllables
forced down throats.
Yowling non-notes writhe in air-
camp songs and hymns cruelly crushed
beneath ivory stamps to seal a soul with
tortured glottal stops
and scenes of bodies pasted with the crumpled flesh-wine of forced copulation.
Their quiet-enough-to-hear-distinctly-learned-helplessness
of unbreeded fevers,
the primary colors we stamp on
their weak torsos, the
heavy crosses and self-served flagulations of
social smiles.
To their cradles we return them
though we have suffered for
their suffering,
they have suffered us
well.