August 13, 2024
tricky honey & A man of winter
Kate Carsella
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tricky honey
You know what they say—
We’re headed toward
Selfish Times. Disunion.
Good then, leave us. Let us part, he chose
acrimony. Sunset and salt, daylight in between.
Citation:
They’ll let you choke on your own
saliva on the floor of the gym in January (!!!)
where you were the model of resolve
where you ignored your body’s call
for surrender. The scythe of time cuts soft.
–Haul out the defibrillator, then.
–The lungs are working fine, though!
No answer. We love a show.
Your lungs survived, though. Somehow.
Four of these spiky years
and there’s no telling when the relief of blunt
force years will be born. If? for us sticking pins.
You know what they say—We live
in a pen.
Who’s in with you?
Who’s in with who?
There is no heading
anywhere. Times is here a spell.
Bodement singing with Fiona Apple menace—
makes you beg for the kill.
No. Not so. Not nearly as
seductive. Seductive more
like a bug lamp. A trick of the light
our last dance, our only beaming.
That trick is envy; the bug, too.
That honey-rich happy sure looks good on you.
__________
A man of winter
Flush suggests warmth
of your blood. I know better.
Sun skipped over that weak
stream like a stone, a yolk
broken over that crumby
mealy toast. Brittle man, too.
“Too,”—me, according to you.
Winter dusts first the crown, your fine
hair just like mine.
Your mountaintop caught, your
resting place now. A scenic view
all for you, of my resting place, too.
You overlooking that plot
of mine. Like a groundskeeper, you keep and you ready.
The sole tending you gave me.
Your digging. Your sharp elbow to my back.
My bier a perfect stage for your strings, your plucking.
(That’s what your generation did, right?
You ‘dig’. You think you invented the guitar.)
‘Not!’
Signed, the kid born ‘89
The knots in me, they
are Our knots, too.
Roots and branches mercied
only in avaricious witness,
only to wither
no matter, not whether,
no matter the weather.
The weather being you.
When you could be anything, you choose
Spartan. You and your whims. Sickles—
my inheritance you despise in me, too.
How do you ghost your own?
How is it you never saw me as anything
other than other? Other than worse.
I sure do make you green.
Let it slide, was my way.
Then I passed from your sight.
Though I inherited your myopia.
I marched myself to the nearest
white candle. Now let me go.
You’ll find you can’t.
Take your time.
You are free to keep
Trying.
That tree hangs high, branching
an armory over your head.
Shadow long felling you.
The only bark you ever had belongs to it.
Soon you shall be that winter
you so covet. True cold forever. Winter
will gather you. That unsparing you’ve long
prized. The draw of that tomb’s long cold.
Shaved, cut clean, cut to the flurries, cut
to the melt and nourish the roots in spite
of your spite. Of all things,
You chose misery. And again.
And again.
Maybe I will hear you in those frosty crunch and crackle footsteps,
the last music left of you upon this earth.
I know this: your seed lives despite.
My seed feasts with fierce appetite.
__________
Kate Carsella is a storyteller and poet. Her writing has appeared in Rat’s Ass Review, Hunter’s Affect, manywor(l)ds, Reverie Magazine, (the) Squawk Back, Catch, Cellar Door, and elsewhere. She was a finalist in the Driftwood Press Adrift Chapbook Contest (2022) and the Glimmer Train Fiction Open (2016). You are welcome to the bardic bullion poetry project at katecarsella.com.
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