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Mark Henderson

A New Father

 

Imagine Herbert’s surprise when little
men, wet from the plumbing, came climbing out
his toilet to hug his feet and lower 
legs like long-lost sons—some half-reptilian,
calling to mind the fabled, flushed baby
gator who lived to grow in the sewers;
some in rainbow patchworks of discarded
condoms; others in doll-cloth versions of 
what he typically wore, bought at thrift shops.
He looked in the mirror, smudged with pimple-
burst, at his unshaved face and unruly
hair before swinging his dangling offspring
with each heavy step toward his computer
to scrub his browser’s recent history.

The Gods of Ash

I say nothing to them of the cigarette smoke

ever fingering its way through the big-enough

crack beneath my apartment’s only door, shaken

uneven in its frame by a step-ancestry

                                    of former tenants. 

 

They affront me doubly (from both sides of their door)

with their dragging existence—a twinned manifest

of Baudelaire’s Ennui: muffled curses quaking

the interior before they settle outside 

to chain a fresh pack together, breathing cancer

and suicide into each other on the short stoop, 

                                    like incestuous siblings.

 

She doesn’t look like she eats much, he’s balding

prematurely. Sometimes I have to talk to them because 

my little dog insists on running over to 

say hello. They don’t bother with courtesies like

fanning the air or exhaling in the other

direction, so I hold my breath a lot. They smile—

mockingly or sadistically I’m not certain.

                                    Ironically, maybe?

 

Everyone else in the complex responds to them

with a similarly veiled annoyance, perhaps

how the ancients would shelter vagabonds for fear

that they might be gods in disguise, who’d smite with fire

the whole of humanity at the first insult.

 

They don’t bother to even kick, let alone sweep,

away the ash that they leave on the stoop before

going back inside—the remnants of other, lost

worlds crushed and smeared on the footpath 

 

                                    of other, future descents.

Sean Ewing Crimson_Elegance.jpg

THE COURTSHIP OF WINDS

© 2015 by William Ray

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