Two Poems

By Jason Huskey

 

Swapped Meat

 

Sullivan sells dead people's possessions
by the backdoor entrance,
a line of scrapbooks, rugs, and "antique" clothes.
His stock comes from at least a hundred estates.
A vulture, stalking the classifieds as he does his customer,
he'd rather peck out your eyes
than give you any kind of good deal.

 

His wife will let you sneak a couple dollars off though,
if you're polite enough--
just have to corner her quickly.
She might even throw in something extra,
if he isn't looking.

 

Tonight, I buy my wife a white bustier
that hasn't been worn since the 1960s.
What stories it has to share and revamp.
She's a writer, my wife,
never feeling the urge to do me anymore,
the way she manipulates her male characters
in the middle of the night.

 

I tell her to put on the dead woman's bustier
and let me help her flesh out her fantasies;
but she says she prefers the touch of gerunds
and the polysyllabic tongue of participial delights.
Says she wants to cut out the passive,
ignite the action,
and burn special votives to the lovemaking
of her own literary voice.

 

I tell her to put on the goddamned bustier.

 

But she only flips me off,
letting me know that in her mind,
going tick-tick-tick out the tips
of her pressed-on nails,
she already has. 

 

 

 

The Writer Haunted by This New Beginning

 

It is the first image upon waking--
a bearded man covered in blood
dragged through a winter's woods.
His nerves, silent beneath the slosh
of his freshly squished mulberry insides,
mutter nothing to each jab of crag,
each cut of briar and fallen pine.
The son's hand leads him through still waters,
tiny digits that slash into palms,
straining to sneak him back home by dusk.
A vision aching against the hiss of crusted leaves
like the breath of a lover long since removed.
Like the truth of a thousand days to go. 

Published October 2007