The Suicide Disease, and: Dog Catchers in Texas
Rent from DeepDyve- The Suicide Disease, and: Dog Catchers in Texas
The Suicide Disease
It happens. My mouth is cut, the sliced lid of an envelope.A perfectly split, notoriously wide, opulent blood orange.If you peer down the hatch, you find a sort of telescope;a sort of rip in the occipital range, cauterized and singed.
The wretched vein flicks, pops at light, bows even to an eyelash.It satchels itself to the bridge of my brow: a thinning wire,a poor man's critique of mortality, a standard issue mustache.It groans under the skin, humbles itself, brushes like swallowed fire.
The body is a burial ground, a reversed birth, a chaos underhand.Is an overflow of traumatic stretch, the pain is ripe for render.I never see it coming. The static pause, the ampersand.I can never catch its tail, the slough of skin made tender.
How the wound spills, acrylic map along the temple, precise and photogenic;the breed of afterlight personified, I tether pomegranate.
Dog Catchers in Texas
How we catch them in the Southwest:
With sweet butter. Sangria. Wild waters in strange places. With a shovel full of coral snakes. With names and missing fathers. Con horchatas.Con handmade flour tortillas. With porches. With poorly whittled totems. [End Page 84] Hollowed stones and rocky hills. With the always stretch of plain.All the beer and corn you can stand.
We catch them with their own hope, sti√ in their empty jean pockets. With a promise that they can lose ghosts in these striations. Orfind them in these hills. Either way get lost.
Boys come in from all over, in every shade of sand. Pretty peach boys and vanilla bean boys, men in full blue-black and sun-teased browns.Los Gallos del Desierto. Once.
I'd arch over to meet them. Bend the tanned rear till it was a super moon, tillthe belly swayed under it, a hammock crest beneath this body. Mud-bruised thighs would rubthemselves cayenne, slap out a hymn, spread like cut roasted peppers. Broil undera sauced San Marcos afternoon.
Boys would rut and rut and linger long after, still panting, drool weeping down penny-coloredcovered skin. I'd obey.Roll over. Pretend.
They would pay me for this.
I would let them. [End Page 85]
Faylita Hicks is an mfa candidate at Sierra Nevada College and creative director of Arrondi Creative Productions. Her work has recently in appeared in Yes! Poetry and her manuscript was a finalist in the Write Bloody Manuscript contest. She currently lives in San Marcos, Texas.
