To Pete,
who crushed my dog’s skull with a hammer
Let me walk with you
across our front yard,
where the grass runs brown
where the pool has killed it
forever-dead. I know
you hate that.
The look of it, a stain
from your porch.
The dog’s bark
keeps you awake.
We received
your letter.
We are away. You hear
the howl and the cry.
See how fur sheds
in clouds this time of year
like cotton rolling, sticking
to the ground.
Take her from the kennel,
dragged by the collar,
and load her into your van.
Take her to the woods
by the water tank.
By the marsh and the nothing place
I played as a boy.
What sort of thing uncoils
in your belly
when you do
what you do?
When you drag her
by the tail now
to the marsh and the crabs
where do you think you are?
But What About Forgiveness
What about living angels
& the Methodist women
selling pork dinner tickets
& nailing my written sins
to a plywood cross?
What about Offering It Up
to a famous chocolate bust
of John Wesley, foiled in gilt
like a Ferrero Rocher?
Say what about picking rocks
from a riverbed / holding
each until it’s blood-warm
& nailing my whispered sins
to the water’s deepest gouge?
What about coming home
to those first, sharp prayers
made on gas receipts & bits
of shale / & What about them
waiting / rattling serpentine
in the toe box
of my boot?
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Stephen Hundley
Stephen Hundley is the author of The Aliens Will Come to Georgia First (University of North Georgia Press, 2021). His work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Cutbank, Carve, and other journals. He serves as a fiction editor for Driftwood Press and is a Richard Ford Fellow at the University of Mississippi.
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Odilon Redon
Odilon Redon (1840-1916) was many things: a painter, printmaker, draughtsman, and pastellist, who, over the course of his career, developed a singular style that fed both the decadent symbolism of the late nineteenth century and the modernism of the early twentieth. His work included etchings of disembodied eyeballs and smudged ballooning minds in charcoal chiaroscuro. From Public Domain Review.
