Description
THE SLOW WOMEN
Renée Sigel
The slow women of vast Sunday
afternoons sit knitting hedgerows;
unfathomable currents against frigid wisdom.
Stitched in brutal delicacy of small comforts;
the hypnotic rounding of knots, encircle corners
held to ransom.
Sniper.
Poems of wool to the gashing wound;
a thesaurus of rooms blown to hell.
Wombs gutted, requisitioned for war.
Ululations.
Mouths guttural; blows spilling saliva
into the dust where rivers breed flies for
the silt of rotting meat;
Requiem.
Drones copulate overhead.
Young Sycamores along narrow straits blush
to a long bluegrey drape of bones;
Matters of prayer
get a beating each sunrise from the slow
women;
dark hands, their ethereal symmetry along the abyss.
No reflection or shadow.
Just the howl of random bags filled with God.
No bodies to be bitten or stolen from forgotten
patent-leather childhoods.
Despair
the only dark crime to complete this precarious
squat of imperative uncertainty.
The gall of men who’d drink your dignity
and blood for a year strokes every encounter
with the stare of boredom ready to detonate
red and awkward mouths. The indelible
smell of hell. Unmarked graves dusted with
inedible sherbet.
Flightless.
The slow women drape the sun in charred skirts.
A wedding cake adorned in its frill.
Torn shawls.
Beauty thickens despite death folded at the
knees. Slowly they congregate, siding with their
own lives, to set free their children from bone-riddled ground.
Renée Sigel
__________________________________________________________________________________
CONVERSION
Mario Susko
I came upon a man in black who sat on a tank,
tending his sheep that grazed impassively
around the craters and among dead bodies.
I am looking for my son, I said squinting.
The bullets in his cartridge belt slung
over his shoulder shone in the sun like teeth.
He smiled, chewing a cigarette to the other
corner of his mouth, and motioned with his hand
to the field. Plenty to choose from, he said.
The sheep were moving away toward the shade
of a big oak tree, the bodies following
on all fours. I strained my ears to hear the bell
I knew. He slid down and stared at me.
Is that your stomach growling, he asked.
I am just trying to find my son, I whispered.
You want me to shoot one? He spat out the butt
and stomped it with his boot that was like my son’s.
We are talking about some good meat, he grinned.
The shirt looked familiar, but I couldn’t tell.
My sheep started to fan out and I suddenly heard
a dog yelp behind me. He whistled, the sound
thin and piercing, making the bodies stop.
I felt the sweat run down my buttocks and legs,
as if someone was punching holes in my ribs.
Have you seen my son, I uttered, not knowing
whether any sound left my mouth. You never had
a son, he yelled and cocked his submachine gun.
The boots were the same, and so was the shirt.
And the Mickey Mouse watch on his wrist was the same.
Tell you what, he said and laughed. I’ll be your son.
Mario Susko
