After a few more days it felt like we were the ones sheltering Max. She became frail and sickly, her skin paling more every day. We only really saw Max during meals, and conversation always felt perfunctory and wooden.
“…a red lantern flashed a signal…
We had never seen such a sign used before,”
the armed visitor alleged.
Mom’s firecrackers took light
with a rattle of gunfire;
and just like that the evidence burned,
no harm done, no fault, no foul,
How much unthinkable evil pushes suddenly in to the
heated rooms. To the rigid impotence of shoulders and neck
there is irritated angry mood in every motion, in this pretty
voiced bird, that can hide under a single green leaf
My wife serves a Texas Jesus,
drafted the kids and a cousin
to a common liar’s cause.
If there’s a fixation beyond
rolled steel fences and firearms
I haven’t heard it.
“I get it. I don’t like big oil companies
either. I just cash their checks! Sometimes
I think the sign out front the station is the only
stock report some people get. Shoot, maybe it is.”
and I don't tell anyone because then they would know
and the fear of it could've been worse
rising like an echo from someone I love
is more frightening than any hand over my mouth
They didn’t wear hoods and Sam recognized their faces. Some from the church balcony. Some men who squeezed his bicep, asked him to come work for them, pushed him down when he did not.
Compared to the first book, the poems have become increasingly creepy, and the “murderer” more vivid. The story inches closer to a horror film, that scene when protagonists find out unpleasant secrets, searching in the shade.
“What do I do, knowing that I need impulses to live?” seems to be the question the book poses through narrative play, a juxtaposition of the main persona’s perspective and murderer’s influence.
Like a stone that slows
as it sinks to the bottom of a well.
Like a person who saw paradise from the outside
and never found a way back home.
The girls on his campus were not the ones who made fun of the way he walked, the way he rolled his eyes, of his pathetic attempts to climb ropes in the gymnasium, a task required for some reason of all students in the Education Faculty even those who, like him, expect to teach secondary history and certainly not primary school physical education.
