a movie theater. On screen
the hanged men speak
to one another from broken
necks, and the aspen leaves
show white in the dark.
COMBINE
Captain Nazret helped the Communists overthrow Haile
Selassie and when
he discovered his wife’s infidelities sewed her into bed
as she slept
and moved his family to the Isle of Man, where he retired
and began losing
his mind, so that one All Hallows’ he pasted a mustache
onto the pastor’s
sorrel mare and rode it through the cobbled streets of Cregneash
saying to the costumed kids,
“Come pet comrade Stalin.” Children loved the old
syphilitic because
he’d show them his stomach’s gnarled track of surgery scars, because
of the violet-backed
sunbird he kept until the neighbor’s cat, with wet green eyes,
reached a paw
through the cage bars, and snagged the bird on one hooked claw
so that a crosshatch
of feathers and blood tattooed the tile floor. That night kids drugged
the Siamese
with cough medicine and stapled it by the scruff to its owner’s
picket fence.
•
On a Siberian expedition, Nikolai Bryukhanov brought the wrong
food for the sledge-dogs,
so they had to be killed. But not by the squeamish Commissar.
On the third day
of Bryukhanov’s trial, Stalin sent a note with accompanying
illustration that read:
“To the members of the Politburo, For all the sins, past and present, hang B.
by the balls. If they
hold out, consider him acquitted by trial. If they don’t, drown him
in the river.”
•
Here sits Queen Anne at Hockley Hole, London
for the dog and bull show.
A rope is tied ’round the root of the bull’s horns and fastened
to an iron stake,
its slobbery gray nose blown full of pepper to enrage it before
it’s baited. Meanwhile,
men hold dogs by the ears. Let loose, the goal for the dog is to hold for all
hell to the bull’s
snout—the most sensitive spot other than the genitals—“If a bull had balls
hanging from its face
they’d be attached to his snout.” Now, either the dog remains
fixed, or is thrown
tearing out the flesh it has laid teeth on. The bull, a skeptic in dialogue
with hope, works
to slide a horn under the cur’s belly, and throw it, so that a dog’s side
is often ripped open
entrails protruding like wet sausage—“Yes, it provides much joy
for the community,
and the animals certainly gain a sense of dignity in achievement.”
•
Goya’s “Portrait of the Family of Charles IV”: intermarriage preserved
the family’s wealth
and the compact features of mongoloids. Deformed by a hunting accident,
Charles—subsidiary
to his wife, his mouth full of gravel—spent his power slowly collecting
watches and wrestling
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