Hatchet Job

 

 Hatchet Job

 

 

Tricks and teases made a hatchet for the autopsy. 

 

You couldn't

just say it was over, oh no. Too many cows

wanted gingerbread. Too many women

in the cellar wanted more time...

Tesla's ghost was on the radio for years

while the black nightingale sang but hardly

anyone listened. 

 

Too much static fuzzing. Too much 

imitation current clogging the waves...

I swear you gave my ear a permanent scar

with all that dizzy disarray, tricks and teases,

bluffs that bragged with musky electric tusks...

 

Put the body

on the table and have done, I said. I'm through

discussing second grade and your mother's

lonesome eyebrows.You don't care about

the cause of death anyway...

 

just the wonderful way

you can chop. 

 

Bravo!

 

January 2022

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

posted for Shay's Word List # 8: 

Russell Edson

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images :Hatchet, via internet. Fair Use

Moon and Cow, 1963 © Alex Colville   Fair Use

 

Medicine Sky

Medicine Sky

After

the explosion

I found 

pieces of you
in all my poems,

embedded shrapnel,

unclean words,

full of fever's fester.

I scrubbed the wounds, 

massaged the scars,

repeating,

autumn is a doctor, 

winter is a nurse,

night's blue sky body

arches over

the surgery of the gods,

poppy-soft, ocean-deep, capable

of illuminating

even
your lies.

~October 2013, 

revised May 2014

posted for     real toads

Mini-Challenge :Flash Fiction 55

The odyssey of the Flash Fiction 55, so long under the gracious guidance of the G-man, continues on at the Imaginary Garden with Real Toads, where the incomparable Fireblossom alternates with the eloquently terse Mama Zen to preside over our journey into brevity. Please come play with us in the new locale.

Image: The Eqyptian goddess of the sky, Nut
Public domain via wikimedia commons

Incriminated

Incriminated

There was a pain that came

that changed me like rain

and I was thankful to have it

when there was nothing else

engineered to maintain

the shape of a self.

Your eyes were all purple

lie-bruised and encircled;

your hand shook at the plug

where you took your last charge

for the strength to go hurt-culled

to not cry when it buckled,

when you had to go large.

The room was as empty

as a January pantry

when Christmas is ghostly.

You wore me over your clothes,

my skin protection mostly

from the strontium flu, plastic froze

to the blue while you stayed prime

and when I dissolved in time

you burned me, love

like a pair of blood-stained gloves

still wet from the scene of the crime.

~February 2014

posted for      real toads

Open Link Monday

Images: Untitled,  by Zdislav Beksinski

May be protected by copyright~posted under fair use guidelines via wikipaintings.org

In the Yellow House

In the Yellow House

In the blue room of the sun

in the yellow house, 

behind terracotta walls

a tossed night is pulled from the bed

and thrown on a pile of other nights

wrinkled, indelibly lorn.

The woman hums as her hands stroke

farewell before it goes in the basket,

remembering the voice in the deep,

how she was loved

with words and lost in silence

far from this landlocked yellow boat

on a prairie sea, ribbed by the

bleaching shipwreck of her life, where 

in the front room she hears

the men say, 

Talk

is cheap.

It takes money to buy whiskey.

Light’s first nod is still a few miles away

across the grainfed graveyard out the window

where Orion sinks in another 

lightening quicksand sky, one foot

on a scruboak branch, both hands uplifted

to the horizon plummeting hawk sure,

hanging on to the moment

before his last fingertip slips past in the fade, 

drowned till tomorrow in star foam,

floating memories, the breaker crashed

ebb of the voice in her dream

softening away away, murmured in the constant

wind rasped fretting of the wheat, sleepless

as the oblivious sea;

so she knows

no wave is ever really gone

no word ever said wasted

no whiskey bought stronger

than what musics her morning song.

March 2012

Posted for    real toads

Today is Open Link Monday at real toads, and I am using a photo from the Sunday Challenge there, which featured Kat Mortensen, late to the party, as usual.Thanks, Kat!

Optional Musical Accompaniment

Image copyright Kat Mortensen

Used with permission.

Forensics

Forensics

Shall we do an autopsy

on the thing that’s dead between us? 

Shall we look at the floor and say,

“The directionality of the blood splatter

is consistent with arterial spray?”

Which of us will play the coroner 

in this cold case reconstruction?

I say I have determined

the cause of death to be asphyxia.

The victim was burked, killed the way a lion 
sometimes smothers a buffalo, 

by clamping its jaws over the muzzle,

replacing breath for breath. I can tell

by the swollen heart, the eyes and lungs,

where the petechial hemorrhaging shows

all the hypoxic arguments ended in

our fingers breaking the hyoid bone, closing

the muzzle, crushing the words.You say 

it's plain by the rosy pink of the lividity

that the body has been subjected to

prolonged, intense cold. Decomp's begun;

the tissues begin to fail, the cornea dulls

so that looking at each other, no ectoplasmic

bridge springs up, nothing of affinity in eyes 

dead red, sightless wide. We've come
to the limit of forensics. No chromatography,

no strike of a DNA match

can light up this black puzzle.

June 2011

Posted for OneShotWednesday  at the inimitable OneStopPoetry

“...The term "burking" comes from the method William Burke and William Hare used to kill their victims during the West Port murders. They killed the usually-intoxicated victims by sitting on their chests and suffocating them by putting a hand over their nose and mouth, while using the other hand to push the victim's jaw up. The corpses had no visible injuries, and were supplied to medical schools for money.”

~ enotes.com/forensic-science/

Image courtesy google image search, no credits available, originating site