← v9n2, Fall 2010
Poetry · Volume 9, Number 2

Ochre xi

Comely & most fair are their shapes. How they glow

Blood flecked in dawnlight, svelte & pulchritudinous.

Resplendent the flaking, the hafting, the binding with sinew,

Worked for hours, worked for days,

tooled upon the mind’s

Impeccable lathe, tooled to in a second razor

Through hide & muscle, to heat-seek the heart,

The huge baggy lungs brimming over

With blood,

Sharp-flecked punctum, the thesis statement

Written through the eye, embedded in the frontal lobe.

So the prey stumbles down, the lungs

Still laboring, the haunches flensed. We stab

& climb the flanks, the real work beginning. I am become

Death, the shatterer of worlds, tooled & supernoval.

We clean our spearpoints—

foaming red the serpentine arroyo.