In Nineteen Whatever
In nineteen whatever my brothers and I
bought a derelict place built from PVC, pine logs,
some sheetrock and hollow core doors in a recluse
scrub maple stand deep in the Kingdom of Dum.
Look, don’t tell me it’s just how things roll in that part
of the mitten. I don’t mean homespun local color,
okay? I mean Odal rune dirtbags and methmouthed
faux-butternut shitjacks at every gas pump and
degenerate bumblecunts armed like they work for El
Chapo streaming RPG vids from the woods
and the warped and malignant ex-mayor of Fuckville
who wants (not to over-finesse the point)
camps.
Whenever it was, say the baby was one
so call it ninety-eight or I think, working back
from the November bonechill the first visit up
on that soupyellow night—there were turkeys out front,
plump with beechnuts and bugs, a whole rafter, so-called
for the roof timbers they would hang from as feast meat—
but, listen, the point is not wildfowl or which
goddamned year, though, for probity’s sake, let’s just say,
ninety-nine?—since as fathomed the watchful Odawa,
years are inconsequential except to mark famine,
who bequeathed requital to us who came after,
the cannibal Wendigo, bringer of civil
collapse—
and the end of the ways we could hold like to like,
before particleboard and shit plywood and all
the miasmic offgasing formaldehyde resins that
pickled what’s left of the upright bluewater
republic, whole hamlets and townships now loopy
and fuddled with kuru in humanflesh frenzies
to signal starvations their broke-brained, dysphasic,
fat famisher-god says they suffer with him
for eternity. Listen, I’m not here to fuss
like some wobbly collegetown sniffy—forearms
are breaching the surface at Antrim and Skegmog
The Rubicon loamsands aren’t holding the
corpse.
***
Originally appeared in Cathexis Northwest
