Skinny Fisted Sons

Splotched yellow teeth softishly

decaying, tobacco specked

like good livestock, fattened

ribbon winners. Oh yes let’s

leer sour mash, gullet a drinking,

several drinkings, several hours of snarl

lipped in soy field. Blood

deer ticks the soil. No concern,

no knives. What flock would

deem to stop us? Come on then,

this the year of too much harvest.

Come on then, ethanol and animal,

spit against each other’s fathers,

teeth against each other’s grinnings.

These days out of order, we are

tinny with the heat of them.

Very little as interesting

as the weather. Decades of corn

kneed boys turning men, ash

elbowed along violet

smear of interstate, poppy crop

hidden in stomach. Tread on it

you poltergeist, you sympathizer, you

erosion. Tread on it and look at

all these magnificent ways we die.

---

David Greenspan is an MFA candidate at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and serves as a Promotion Editor for Slope Editions. His poems have appeared, or will soon, in places like DIAGRAM, Laurel Review, New South, The Southeast Review, The Sonora Review, and others.