- from “In the Gun Cabinet”
In the gun cabineta closet
where I drafted another maker
the hand of mthe drivel
in a Quonset, on a fieldthat Saint Bernard named Hoss chased our church group to a frozen pond
a bridge he slipped from, breaking the icethe glass I wake under, pricked
blue veil, white dress, red lips
they call my namethey cry it
they lean in and whisper you first
& like the christened, I’m wetthere’s blood & water on the walls
the white duvet stripped from the mattress, the floor’s half mandorla, me opposite, curled
like an infant, an insectsucking a breast
her finger inside me, a circle [End Page 129] then a man comeswhite hair
black clothes, black eyes
trumpets a foghorn he throws me down a palm full of bird’s eye a crown full of burl a fall-boy a fountain a prod
the light sweeps through the stained glass in vectors through the gun cabinet pools of color over wood grain
the open cabinetI wake in [End Page 130]
There’s a violence here
that folds youtwo roads
meet
in the countryunder a poplar tree
in the evening
(in the gun cabinet, evening)over the power lines
slack / a fence missing picketsthe house now boarded
built on contract by migrantsstalking the harvest north
every summer
I was born, beauty endedmy appetite for destruction
cock out / tongue flutteringunder the pantry as it emptied [End Page 131]
Mike Lala is the author of the chapbooks [fire!] and Under the Westward Night, and has poems appearing in Boston Review, Fence, the Brooklyn Rail, Diagram, Artifice, the Awl, and more. He’s co-founder of Fireside Follies, poetry editor of Washington Square, and a Veterans Writing Workshop Fellow at nyu. More at www.mikelala.com.