By Pete Miller
A retch of old corn cobs, drains
clogged with guilt ripped
out in fistfuls
of crime-stained hair,
even here,
along the furthest edge’s
furthest uncertainties,
he is made to sleep
beside the factory-clouded creek,
the hawk-dropped,
ballooned,
gutted-on-her-back
raccoon ravaged
like some doubly unwanted
leavings of a raided Dumpster,
but offering, still, within her, a space
to shelter if he’s willing
to shed more dignity,
to shrink
the last possibilities away,
to crawl inside and hold his breath
against night’s
over-brimming
promise
of someone, something, coming born
from some even stranger place’s
mind, from that brown creek’s
even worse parents than his own—
Daddy the smokestack,
Mother the skin-stripping vat,
the border’s
hardening wax.
FROM THE EVERYBODY’S PEOPLE LITTLE FREE LIBRARY
Warm grandmother
kitchen small boy beneath the table
a cozy stable for a little brown
dog gorging on
lumpy porridge and fatty scraps
until he’s grown into a pony
who eats the meadow and all
the barbed wire until
it swells into a tank
killing faceless foes until it hates
killing gets tatted
with jagged-
eyed skulls spills this
long beard
that tangles up the mud-
crusted track so
it stalls out
in the warm rain
slowly
shrinks into a simple
brown-bearded saint
roadside who
blesses martyrs
limping past but
resists
all those barbed hooks
of his own obligation’s
punctured flesh
heart pulled long
until bursting a fountain
soaking a battered
old staggering
brown dog to sprawl
boneless across
the legs of the saint
now slumped against
a kitchen wall’s
blasted remains as
he presses to his ear
in prayer an empty
bottle to receive
forgiveness from both
the scratched-up label’s
brown pony’s long face
tattooed
with grandmother’s tears
and those pieces
of himself scattered
beneath a table
burning on the other side.
Pete Miller is the author of the chapbook Born Soap (H_NGM_N). A graduate of Arizona State University’s MFA program, he lives with his wife and daughters in Omaha, Nebraska where he works in homeless services. He co-edits the online poetry journal A Dozen Nothing.