Gia Kelliher
The Cleavers
Corpses, corpses all,
One hundred Frenchmen solemnly hanging
Ensconced in their white marble
Which then is in turn enveloped by that
Deep, impenetrable jungle.
Impenetrable, though I admit, cleaved and into it
Thrust by each man one hundred tons of
Shining white marble. Forgive my fib
Or rather loose tongued yammering, one hundred
And five.
Five bodies unrecorded. Check the ledger
One hundred nooses, five ghosts,
Laval, Saint Georges, LeSalle, Decazes, et Blum.
Conspiracy not, no plan laid, no devilish familiarity
Among the men, dutiful, dull, dull, gay, morose, in respect.
No kinship but the cot,
The sisal, the saltcod, licking the thumb before
Turning the page, the river and in it
Grotesque little fish like smote black pavers
Mounting and mounted by that lascivious river
Endless endless brown, the whole eye made wet
Feebly scanning the fractured alleys between the
Jurassic brush, drip around the lips, cauterized,
Hair like a boar, worms the size of goats, defiled
Organisms which clung like remoras to the asp of the arc.
Days upon the steamer, a new language of breath
Minted by the watchers mute, laboring, tolerating
But a thimble of wine beneath the beams of this chapel.
Rainless as a threat. The sun like a wound shone
Upon the smooth mound of carrara, alien to this place.
Doe-skinned cupuacu on their threadlike steams
Hoisted beyond the reach of the cleavers
Who yearn for the wet kiss of jungle fruit but
Eyes on the marble, reach not over the bow and
Tip the vessel, plunge forever into those hungry waters.
At the fork, the city embossed in their plans, but
At present a shrubby waste, minky ferns and lush rot
Unload the idea of a civilization on ramps
With ropes and clean this place without humanity
Libraries, hearths, sporting fields, wet nurses, a promise.
A shining blemish, the cleavers, their eyes
Wet as their mothers. A mirror to the blackest plums,
Tender leaves, in this place, the innocence of the bloodstained
Isn’t it obvious?
It is our own tomb we build here.
What atrocity is this, Laval?
An idiot carpenter for an idiot house. Futile, Blum.
Saint George, his own cock sickled up his own ass. LeSalle,
Wed to a tapir. Decazes,
better if I do not say.
Do not lose yourself to seducers, luscious. Be not
Enfeebled by knives shaped like gavels.
If you hunger, tear their foreign organs from their fragile chests
Like a baby pulls up fists of grass.
Be always as you are now. I beg.
––––
Dolphin
I saw you first–
two toes, knees, the glint,
toe ring, belly ring
skin, bean black.
Hideous watercraft sputtering impotent
sloshing, pissing an
arc of diamond spray. The crust
of the sea and me.
Below,
tonguing the sand, pulling the griddling sun down
Below, your bulbous asses, irregular, pimpled.
Below,
you. Your bed shaped body and
my vessel engorged slyly
long pink tapered wet point.
Igniting such a bestial fire, so
shouldn’t it have a wick?
This original fire, that primordial sky
its lacerations bled of hue and… Crack!
A tongue of flame, a union, carbonic, gaseous,
rod and receiver so unlike.
Its baby black.
The new animal.
Terrestrial vixen, you
squirming thing, you
new hole in my head but you,
you, you, you.
I will tolerate your baseness if you
Feed my appetites.
––––
Grief Machine
Hey ho, yea yo
Clonking my way to the Grief Machine.
Take your shovel oh shoulder
Your doubles, clobb’ring our way to the
Grief Machine.
Incessantly ringing,
Dodd’ring, smoldering
Equine
Ol’
Nonce.
Shht pull, Shht throw
Filling my cart at the grief machine
Shlumping our way to the grief machine,
Spitting limply, spitting
Out one of a kind crimes,
Spitting out liquor, spitting out
credit, spitting out women made barren
By unknowable poisons, beating their
Bellies, plain like a drumskin, bely other
Women, heavy with child, unsmiling.
Crimes of thy father, a babe in jail or
A child killer or a drunken father, loveless.
The unemployable, the guilless,
The lame, always a place
At the grief machine.
––––
Gia Kelliher lives in Los Angeles and writes poetry there. She's been published other places like Boxx Press, Expat, and Apocalypse Confidential. She's got cash in her bag usually–you can try to rob her of it but she bites.