Tick chicken, snapped bones with the marrow sucked out. America with stained lips, grinning. Florida tries to pull herself off the mainland, drifting into the Atlantic. A constellation falls from its proper place and collapses in the mind of Jupiter, lightning crushes a skull. We beat each-other with blunt objects and then fall forward into prisons where penance is expected but never given. Prisons are revolving until each prisoner reeks of freedom, makes the jailbird’s skin crawl. My limb departs like a parent. My skin unhinges like breakdown. I am six and stealing pencils to build fires, lead poison bloom. I am crossing over the border where the lockers hum and the dogs explode. A scissor cuts a sound from the air, like a chunk of flesh, it is cooked in a skillet until the pitch is golden and crispy. On a plate the sound is not thunder. On a table the sound is crashing into the porcelain beneath it, cracking the heirloom, ruining the dinner, bleeding into the cloth an orange stain.
by Sam Eliot
What Hunger Causes previously published in the Writebloody Press anthology, Aim for the Head.
