Like Hell You Are

The Devil made a meal of me and all

the Sundays I was sleeping.

To think of all the hours,

what I might've offered to the Book or of the Book

to needful ears grown up like burdock in our hag-rid

thorn-bit flock of town.

Sunday at the bedpost, heeling way

a good dog might, his face near a man's.

He kept a blade to pick his teeth, what fathers used

for supper fixed the way our mothers did,

hog meat from a creature slaughtered on the land.

Now I don't fix any man a meal like her,

and work it is to do it, though only one child mine to hush.

Her supper was a parting, like

to square it up with him and God,

what order seemed most right to her.

Did she even love them?

What I fixed was skin, thumbed good,

unbound, leafed through, like these

trees would free me something fresh, and

something came and gone without a word.

She was good when goodness penned her. Sparrow-loose

I was and still it's hard to say I sin good enough

my goose flesh caught his notice.

Source: Even Shorn (Sarabande Books, Inc., 2021)