What Hunger Causes

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.

On The Sad Height

I remember my childhood

late nights with my Father

talking for hours

more Him

than Me.

 

I miss those nights

spending time like

its your last two

dimes.

 

The urgency of the morals

told in a confession of

one Man’s life, intent

to create a Man of a

Son.

 

The details always blur

as if it mattered anyway

the story of a young Man

is always the

Wanderer.

 

The last we spoke

it was of your

Peace in Life

as we drank wine

at the tops of trees

lighting the stars

at Night.

 

I recall the strangest thing

as I was doing my wandering

just after the sun went down

I completely stopped, unaware

of the purpose for such a feeling;

an uneasy glow from my soul.

 

The Night turned to a

new dark I’d never seen

I imagine my subconscious

beaming like a dream;

my heart falling asleep.

a feeling so Pure

that it takes years

to feel anything

again.

 

My passion has suffered,

and my apologies are genuine

 

Father, what is a Man

once his wandering has

reached its end?

 

by Michael Golden

The Rain

made the Snow in the

Mountain grow, and that

very graceful heart-shape vine

with heart-shaped leaves,

I believed called

Choke Weed

 

A delicate rose leaned

pink petals as in disbelief,

toward an unknown weed

with leaves the size of

dinner plates

 

by Carol Smallwood

 

Carol Smallwood co-edited (Molly Peacock, foreword) Women on Poetry: Tips on Writing, Teaching and Publishing by Successful Women Poets (McFarland, 2012). Her poetry received a 2011 Pushcart nomination. Women Writing on Family: Tips on Writing, Teaching and Publishing, with The Writer’s Chronicle editor as foreword writer is from (Key Publishing House, 2012)

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