from Home Guard

Our fathers can’t call this a bayou without spitting. Bride
-like but lacking ryegrass or a way home, we still swam, a little
drunk, suspicious of archangels hunched in the trees shuttling
smoke, out to where wood sent the watershroud peeling
around it, soaked black with rot-witness. Forget stupor,
forget the marble warhorse prowling the property line. Leave
everything unsaid: how your thumb [             ] & gleamed.
Exit wet & slicked. I mean his hips, I mean my mouth,
I mean I wanted to be bridled, left at that wet altar wearing
a veil of water, then licked clean. How the sick lean against
the sick. Runt of the litter in the same sack the chaff goes.
Ever since I drowned I’ve been confusing angels for men
with wings. The dock for a door I could be carried across.
And the grass. It’s putting on what’s left of our shirts.

Read more from Issue No. 16 or share on Twitter.