aayounga hard-boiled detective
would describe me all gum-shoe mickey spillane
as a serial passion killer
beneath a slow moving ceiling fan
swaying to a street corner saxophone
smoke unfurling through suspicious window shades
into a neon-lit city of perpetual night
feet propped on his overworked desk
waxing how this dish
she takes a powder
varies her modus operandi
jealousy mistrust stubborn convictions
yet what is unquestionably hers
are the exit wounds
she leaves on the guy
there are but three
unchangeable forces
known
in our meager lives
.
history is indestructible
dying
and the passage of time
.
that having been said
no wrongful death
may be avenged
with the death of another
.
if history has taught us
nothing else
it is that
war
makes murderers
of all humankind
then came that moment
sitting across the diner table
as the butter knife entered
intercostal muscles
anchoring your feminine ribs
when the last thread
holding your white summer dress
together
gave way
the room and your lungs fell silent
and you
knew
you just fucking knew
to your bloody shoes
that you would be the next woman
whose character would be assassinated
body chewed by snaggled tooth
bones licked clean
gone through
entrails strung across
a pennsylvania turnpike
and he would soon be
full mouthed
reliving the kill
while eating a pink fleshed
corned beef sandwich
talking of you
using words as a means of sacrilege
to the next gullible victim
while explaining he’s never physically
hurt a woman
and you shouldn’t
make him break
his streak
over you
my sons
are the only true love
i’ve ever felt
in my adult life
i don’t know what men are for
but violence
screaming
dying of tobacco field wars
raping the women and land for money
ernest hemingway shooting sharks in the ocean
with a gun
his bloody plume only attracting more
and walking out elaborately carved
revolving doors
beside our family church
her corpse lies chained
to the crudest of casons
an eighteen wheeled barge to carry away
any memory of her majesty
centuries of rings compose her fallen trunk
she has been murdered by her own
this primordial beech tree
slaughtered
bleeding out our family history in xylem and phloem
this grandmother who has shaded the weary shoulders
of our toiling ancestors
for two hundred years
who has seen every birth, death, family reunion, and creek bed salvation
whose roots grew beneath the graves before they were filled
she is now as dead as they are
she had become too much to care for the cousins said
with no thought of taking up a collection for her care
or notion to call an arborist
executioners are far cheaper
they have cut down our family tree
turned our homeland into a crime scene
burned our history out of the ground
dishonoring god’s earth
all the while claiming she was rotten
but it was not her who harbored disease
the sickness lies within the hearts
of her ungrateful shade tree children
who massacred her without consideration
as useless as moths at war
no forgiveness given
i curse the henchmen
that they may lose their way to heaven
twenty-nine year old
mother of three
stair step children
all under the age of seven
laboring under the weight
of her fifth month of pregnancy
with the fourth baby
came home from work one night
and shot herself twice
once in the head
and
once in the heart
yet it matters not
the numbers don’t add up
or that her commonly unlawful boyfriend
was never charged with the crime
because ’round these parts
they call that sort of death
a kentucky suicide