Momento Mori
Her box of whipstitched cardboard open,
lonesome ancestral weft, it allows me to see
Ma in the tall pasture.
We played games with sticks, toys chipped from slate,
burlap sacks, fish like glass, antique marbles,
dogwood chalices, ornate grapes.
On the backyard block Pa cut off chickens’ heads.
Bodies in entrechats around the woodhouse,
their bloody necks spewed.
Unpacking his stoic beans, unfolding her starry quilts,
a watershed black creek is remembrance,
its granite too big for bridges.
A tulip poplar’s champagne cups
crushed Pa’s daddy at thirty-four
as he logged the Snowbird Mountains
His widow of six in Stecoah, Julie leveled a shotgun
on officers from the Good Fellas Orphanage
in her scrub-dirt yard. They turned back.
Splitting wood has roughed my palms.
The last gold dollar has gone. Old wisdom remains:
the beard of the broom cannot sweep
without the shaft of the handle.
Witches pass through keyholes
to find a grinning stag. Hollers and coves
run down to valleys and gaps.
Old Scratch still could sell a tin dipper
to a spring lizard.
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Fontana Jailbreak
Oh, blot the stars with beetle-black ink.
Lovers doomed the gorge to lawlessness
and spattered the balmy sweep of night:
trampled tobacco, stomped pumpkins.
Trees were bent rakes, the moon was late.
In a houseboat on a shrunken lake,
she rattled down her zippers.
The convict’s hands mellowed.
Glib and droll in pine-sap breeze,
his juniper breath was vaporous.
She waltzed him to the crossties
beside the hollow lake—verily they glowed.
A train tumbled the gorge. Pouring a tonic
of meanness, the madstone moon shone down.
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You Like That, Don’t You Boy
I’m old most days. Learned to hide myself in my clothes.
I breach cadences with you of burliness and treacle,
flavors we have licked, Chomney, you Bando Quast!
Madge Flando has become soupy twixt her muffins.
She’s ready for us to dirty ourselves, prick our tips
and fill our creases full of rose hips—on a swindler’s ship.
Shaven man and woman pigs, sacrificial implosions,
with eager ears for obbligato, shall be burned like sage.
Guide Ms. Morpheme down by her earlobes
while she sucks it good. Never spake Zaron Thrust,
thunder smoke on garbage, as before. Peace is a lens shutter
capturing a joy, winked eye in the ruptured field
of human contact. Why did you not ease me down?
You’ve held back too long, Morg Hoglig. Bloodhound.
Our tongues make swagger with the ballast of hops.
We mad in the room, legs weak as chopsticks, drums
tumming a martial topographical flap, shaking and seeping
for a glimpse when she scoots slow. She slumbers,
full in her pot with angst for the jeering world. What hey!
Aim for me, leave no loaf unturned, you Storkon Magwop!
Remember when you were a boy and black clouds entered
from the East? The turkey vultures followed you on the ridge
but it was Sunday and the cliffs called, and you climbed
an easy way up a crevice to hear the water rush. I won’t
be blue always, cause the sun wobbles tight over my whore,
wiggling out of her pantsuit, working her gum, charging me
with infractions of superior light. Another world inside
the left-hand of our night, eking out. We couple like eagles.
Way we was born, Boggins Norlank, planks put down
on a Florida prairie, alligators flopped over the highway
in mating season, bereft of inner tubes, of egret snacks,
in this way we move as kids eroded on beer,
displaced tendrils of universal pomp. Left strictly
with bass thump, as if to smooth it: if you don’t want
to smell my smoke don’t monkey with my gun.
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Benjamin Pryor is from Maggie Valley, NC. His work has appeared in The Oxford American, The Southern Review, Cimarron Review, Oxford Magazine, The Wallace Stevens Journal, The North Carolina Literary Review, Main Street Rag, MiPOesias Magazine, and Pataphysica. He currently lives in Chapel Hill.
