Arsenic Lobster poetry journal |
Issue Thirty-six Winter 2014 |
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The Father’s Son Annie Virginia This is old and a row of hatchets hanging on a shed wall. 2 angels kissing because their God is off to war. 8 hatchets. The boy has counted. His mother has collected 23 figurines of angels. They keep her and her son safe from him. Mothers cannot protect their sons. Brian, 5, found missing his hair and the skin of his palms. The angels are the kind of guard dogs the boy’s future lover would examine nervously in a world where a lover was safe inside this house. Restless canines, seraphim. Like hounds, they know ahead when the father will return. These angels have each played the boy’s fantasy, girlfriends, each in different poses. At night he jerks around. In the shed the hatchets are quiet. 7 of them. Steven, 6, found missing his fresh new molars and the skin of his palms. The boy gets a new toy soldier when his father comes home. He hides it away in the dark muffle of his closet. It smells like candy and sweat. He promises his angel he’ll keep her. His mother sleeps like a fever in a large bed alone. Terror is her husband’s hands, but she keeps her son softly, well-skinned. With skin. Thomas, 5, once gave a nickel to the strange and quiet boy who didn’t know how to play the arcade game. Found missing his fingers, his pocket change, the skin of his palms. The boy pretends, ceramic hard, to be asleep when the angels bark. When his father returns. In his bed in the morning is a teddy bear with wet feet. Outside a dark broth hosed from the shed. The house of a dozen leather-bound Bibles. In the woods the deer stand tense as bows around the property. Their hair stands on end for the boy in his bedroom with empty walls and an angel smothered under his pillow. What prayer the angel makes, she makes for him. |
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