BIRDS OF NIGHT
Only proof
she had a mother:
one fuchsia,
shook-off,
boa feather.
After taverns, her father
arrays all the wrong plumage—
jeweled daggers, preening
pajamas, silk,
begs her
to play sulky rabbit,
guilty raccoon,
cigarette vendor.
His weight on her pillow,
his talons wet with mouse.
Grown in pointy,
her dreaming glows
hollow, her dream house
this lean-to with Juggalo Jim
in Box Factory Woods, his
shirtless anarchic fermentation’s
kindly stench
no protection, 3 a.m.,
sound of a ladder’s dragging
dead leaves and
it’s her father’s boots
on the rungs to stretch
plastic wrap
over a bird’s nest,
its chicks, a dark rehearsal:
her face, should she ever
again dare sleep.
LES AT LETHE ORPHANAGE
Stiff rag of a bar,
he just wants to stalk lost ease
with the other lost uneasy.
But swelty dusk wets a dress with
sideways talk and soon there appears this little broke-
off motel next door, its smolder. Soon
a ziggurat of pills and a second, even bigger
pimp who wants paid twice and a third time
for his knife. What starts as a simple
slash of pain soon gashes open so wide
there’s no room for Les inside it alone;
it’s everyone’s. And while they suffer
he slinks down to what could be a coal cellar
except it goes on winding deeper forever
and slaps him with a chill and then a burn,
a strangled man’s gurgle, a torrent battling its chains.
And every lost weed
that ever wept in a field beneath his blackouts
now bends here to wilt the banks refashioned
as a totem of a new parentless dawn.
And these frozen hands, where did they learn
to undress someone so finally, to press upon him
that so longed-for libidinous doting of a mother?
POPPIES
Despite
the after-hours
hour,
despite his dark
glasses’
cracked lenses,
the don’t-speak-
Spanish-
can’t-be-
bothered
nurses
let the visitor in
because—
Antonio’s
gaunt prognosis,
what matters?
At the tents,
they never more
than nodded, but
here he sits with gifts:
plush rooster
and Long John Silver’s
fish and chips,
reading glasses,
a phone to call
Guadalajara.
He laughs
like the Jungle, no smile,
and somehow knows
every note in the chart,
pancreatic
tail obscured by
bowel gas shadow,
what the jaundice
and the ammonia gestate
towards pure
fact.
He wags
a charred
twig plucked
from the camp’s sordid
fire to mock
Antonio’s brandy-
pleading,
Nuh nuh nuh
grabs his arm
and bites
up and down
till the
bitter-
ness directs where
to suck long.
The flowers
he brings
are for the doctor.
CONTRACTURE
When thunder loped
other kids skipped,
but he limped,
lightning-licked,
the clump with the crutch.
Grown-up work,
the production floor’s
protocol sunk
so alcohol-soaked
it shrunk
to nipple-small the
emergency
shut off button,
shuttle-launched
vomiting vats,
a pig-shit Pompeii,
his chest
mottled in
pink, raw twists:
such that he could never
again stand a shirt,
which, in barring him,
the Mission said,
offended
the other guests.
Well,
he counters to the white cat
balled-up McDonald’s bag
blown into his doorway—
as the evening’s curling
breeze tightens
into night’s
harder snapping,
they offend me.
Pete Miller is the co-editor of the online journal A Dozen Nothing. His work has appeared in several journals and his chapbook Born Soap was published online by H_NGM_N. He works in homeless services in Omaha, Nebraska.