Trigger Warning: This poem, from the viewpoint of a serial killer, is the creepiest thing I’ve ever written. After reading it, my wife said “I’m not sure I want to share a bed with the man who wrote this.”
Henry Lee Remembers Grandmother’s Garden
I smile and recall the sparrows,
wings separated from their torsos
and nailed to the cedar fence
like so many unachieved desires,
an occasional feather ruffling
in the breeze, simulating flight,
their power now all mine to savor.
Art begins in the heart’s
crotch, compresses through the ribcage
and up the vertebrae, drills through
the skull, directly behind the eyes,
emerging as idea, as will or compulsion.
Or release. I loved those birds,
pulling them apart, arranging their
pieces by odor. How, rising from
dirty little mounds, their outstretched
feet squeezed the air from my
lungs, sharp bursts scattering
into the sun’s evening gore. I have
attained no higher state in the years
since that day. While the flies and one
lone wasp buzzed happily around me,
proof that wings claim neither heaven
nor earth, that godness lies within,
I lay there in the splendor
of the torn and detached, among
heads and crops, my fingers caked
black and stiff, wondering which
treasures, what other
sweetness the week would bring.
* * *
“Henry Lee Remembers Grandmother’s Garden” first appeared in Taos Journal of International Poetry & Art in February 2017. I’m grateful for editors Catherine Strisik and Veronica Golos for featuring my work in their journal.
I’d read an article on what not to write about – reminiscences of grandmothers, gardens, birds and so forth – and couldn’t resist inserting those elements into a poem. The editor who wrote the article rejected an earlier draft of the poem…
ucks her fingers when they freeze, wet with snowballs, wee woolen gloves tightening and loosening. The catch of a summer dress, long onto the tops of wellies that bite the back of her legs, that kick up the smell of wet grass and mud underfoot. This is the sin of experiencing other, still your basic ignorance, still warring with knowledge – those fingers ache, then numb, then warm, no matter that the duffle coat’s worn as a cape, a play costume, doesn’t she know that to pretend other puts her in danger for ever? And yet she strides across that field, that trapped green by houses, to the red/yellow flaked swing set and the slide, wipes wet from the seat and the chute with her sleeve, sets her tongue to a chain and tangs iron, sits in the baby-swing, skirt/dress tucked once, twice, the same way she attempts handstands against…
O at the Edges 