Listen

to the brown account of children Grandfather raised
from earthworms:

At first, no life

mark shivers among bits of them
that (sliced into slivers) unite into a blind shadow.

But peel

your gloom from a hillside, flip it on its black writhing back;
wipe the crusted dirt with sunlight.

This is bread

for thin thoughts. This is the unwashed goliath
that slaps a tombstone from your foot.

As membrane

we create life with grunts and thrusts; as skin
we embrace our symbiotic bones.

Read them
as bleached sticks in the loam:

Here points the fibula of Daniel to the lion; here the radius
and tarsals of Alexander

drip
the tubercular milk.

This piece first appeared in Ditch Poetry, January 2014.

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By Jon on Sep 20, 2018 21:26 (UTC)

Tuberculosis milk?