Bread of Tears
Nathaniel S. Rounds
Fowlpox Press
©MMXI Nathaniel S. Rounds
All Rights Reserved
©Copyright2010
NathanielS.Rounds
AllRightsReserved
Printed by Automatic Train Control
PublishedbyFowlpoxPrint
This is an Egg Tooth Imprint
Contents
May contain traces of naturally occurring mercury in the form of poetry from other components
(life is one such example) at less than one part per trillion.
Living Bird Loose
1.
She pushes and thrusts and prods and curses the washtub over scorched
Living Bird Loose
Ground
Blood does indeed mix
With sweat
And tears
She dead reckons
With a Coyote tail Knotted and ending In a thigh bone
One good eye
Searches out fine fruit Bondmaid Dina Voederbiet Of 3663 Sunset Trail
Circumnavigates from the belly of a cast iron washtub
Ball-and-claw feet
Meet wheelbarrow tires The vessel‟s captain is a
Knock-kneed crabapple dumpling
Who
Suffers confinement inside
Eaton‟s finest figure former corselet
Feet in waders tread
Rain water turned to rhubarb punch
Mossberg 12 gauge Is
used as a paddle
Fingernails drip black and white
Household enamel
If blows were books
Dina is a well-read woman
Where the Schulte farm house used to stand
2.
An old Chrysler combination ambulance and hearse
Gathers dust and rust and seats on very quiet driver
Named
Billy "Slobber Box" Schulte
He was the only man in Cumberland County
To have made a million- and- a- half dollars selling blueberries
And still wear the same pair of coveralls
Mighty 100-proof Oedipus complex clogged the cornmeal mash
Between his ears
Billy defiled the rakers Dina included
Hoarded junk cars
Buried cats alive
His own fate was sealed
With a bag and a twist tie
3.
Dina‟s glass eye keeps vigil
Over the Chrysler Mausoleum
She has burned, burned
And burned these fields again and again
Fifty-nine acres of low bush blueberries
Minus the inventory
But Dina can still see them
Sometimes painted black like a cloud-covered
Sky at midnight
Sometimes a foggy blue-gray
Or a solid blue like her baby‟s cotton blanket
She stops her vessel when she spies some untouched berries
These ripe ones defy season‟s passing
She drops her 12 gauge in the tub and gets out to investigate
The berries pass from her hand to a small baby rattle and driftwood marker
A stone‟s throw from Billy
The marker has the name "Blue Boy" on it
And some plastic lace and a glass eye
A blackbird settles on a nearby branch
It warbles pook-pook-pook
And flits off with the north wind
Mind Your Martyrs
1.
In a coffee lineup at end time‟s end
I was cultivating small talk with A half-baked potato in a ball cap Coughing up chestnuts like
"Corners are holding cells for cowards" And
"Baskets are prisons with softer bars" Then it was back to the coach‟s board To set up the game just so
Knocking urban legends and
Papistical idolatries
Into the goalie‟s net
I had dissuaded the man from overeating
Until a spirit of sickness overtook him
And his intestines spilled out at his pant legs
There was little that could be done And so I took his last cup of coffee And drank it
2.
On a moonlit mission frightful I
Sent a message via Photophone slide trombone
All about the land mass falling into tinted water
World‟s last otter sobbed over gobs of provolone
Balinese banana leaf daybed soaked up sadness in the night
Mass hysteria was dumped into the punch bowl
Man and his dog were wound up tight
By the half-commission hatful (sigh)
Sodden gunner cannon balled into a shrieking secretarial pool
And I could only watch and paddle watch and paddle
Cling onto logs and small children A catfish surfed the flood waters Swept its way to the top
Of my head
Marked its territory
I didn‟t mind getting vitamin D the hard way
But could kill for a bucket of vinegar
And some beer-battered beer
I bottled my whine and swallowed
My last Vicodin
Dreaming of sunshine and free
Therapy
Uncapped and Sleeping
Tooth by tooth We are all dying
One by one they abdicate their thrones
Leave their bitter dust in apples and scones
Fangless truth is tempered by the shock of pink
In a dull pit
Lit by light unmarred, unmoved
We sink into our graves
Reproved
The Garbage Tree
And the world is an upturned tree
Of repurposed copper coil and aluminum
Welded but stretching out
From rusted dump truck hood
Angled and covering
Springs suspended above mud-caked piano
Utterly decomposed and yet
Still playable for the incorrigible
Your Albino Aquatic Frogs Are In
Or
One Plague in Four Voices
Bread of Tears Page 1
