Three Poems

  OX

That was our last unripe year, rib cages bald, bright and evermore palpable. The county’s only faggot bar had just swapped its signage from hand-painted to Helvetica. We drank as though new policies had activated, and we were too measly to grandfather. The men inside covered in slobber and glitter, I felt unreflective, so filthy, a pauper. Did someone say poppers! would blurt Alexander, and his asshole would begin to open wide. Outside, the rain arrived as if on a curfew. And we had curfews too. If I ever got a tattoo—I confessed, walking through the dirty water, through the lightning’s penmanship— across my ribs, a zebra mussel, inching imperceptibly away. One good word half-hidden in the slime of its meander, maybe EPILOGUE, maybe OCCIDENT. Alexander protested, because everything I did was on purpose. It filled my heart with helium. Occident, I emphasized. Not Accident. Ox. His insufficient moustache hairs had caught one drop of rain. Crickets scraped songs off their bodies with their legs.

  ALWAYS GREENER 

There you are he says and I say that’s what I keep telling myself. Imagine Laika writing letters to the runt from her litter about the colour of the grass. The envelope burning up well before the lithosphere. When I awaken my whereabouts are murky but not a large concern. When moths gnaw the toque I crocheted it becomes a come rag. In outer space a dog dies and later, in Soviet Russia, another. One saw twenty sunsets in a day. Both saw their worlds in black and white and grey.

  WELLS-NEXT-THE-SEA 

A challenge is a dare there’s a better word for. Brother, you never kept those ambitions at bay and now just look, the sun is gone, the bats are making love. Our bed was like a tantrum, warm and so impossible to leave. There were acres of it; their death cast a musk across the squash. “It” being orchard bark, abandoned. An acre being a unit of measurement I could never, ever fathom, even today, with a summertime of farming under my belt. Acorn, spaghetti, butternut: I liked them best inedible and decorative. For that matter, I liked this song more when I thought the composer placed his head in an oven. The song is called “Ghost.” I have come around to the squash’s taste, the wax and wane of its orange which speaks of other, more enormous oranges. It is the same rhetoric every flammable autumn: Get it done, move along, go to bed. If I cannot do it, brother, I want you to hollow me out.