Karen sends me her book, and I'm sure I'm not meant to share it, but her poems are knock-out beautiful and I marvel at them, so I'll post some here over the next few days, for me to have, for you to read, and she won't know until I tell her. Later.
HORSEFLESH
Like the stone spoon eyes of a man whose casket
bought and built says no I'm going down
to the track and will be long as I can go
and lucky bornite cracked and ribmeat red
inside his pocket he goes--or pushy elders
telling mothers horseflesh eaten from the bone,
between month one and two of eating flesh,
will make your child's conscience clean--this is how selfish
I have been, how ballerina and bloody toed
I've minced through what I got, ridden high
inside my pocket, uh-huh I used my knees
and a metal bit to push the best flesh hard
through sharp rocked shoals and then forgot. Not
that I know any better. No I bored
to death expensive pros with every part
of myself I could butcher and scale and scold. So
I'd say I never gained a thing, even less than
the bloody old gambler pushing his luck or
the white bones spooned in the charnel house gravel
and cleaned by the meat bees in six days cold.
published in Verse
