Bird Eating Bird_ Poems - Kristin Naca [3]
reflections inside
the glass lend it
dimension while outside
the surface and shape
are seamless, but
for some stitching
underneath, a zipper
dialed around the
bottle’s base to
serve as feet.
And where
the glass corners
from cone to barrel
a ring carved from
the bottles being
packed too close
and rubbing together
in their crates.
Scars that
keep dry and
soft as silk, even as
the glass beads, and
you start to trace
the droplets back
over the powder,
and still dry after
you’ve swabbed up
the condensation
and your fingers
have gone clumsy
from the bottle’s
brittle sweat.
When the bottle’s
this cold, the swivels
of glass are charged,
icy bulbs that steal
heat from the nubs
of your fingertips,
so you rub them
to your forehead
and feel nothing
but your own heat
swirl back and forth
from your head
to your hand.
Each time you drink—
the bubbles rising up
through the sweet,
brown liquid, stirring
your nose, then lips—
how easily details
of time slip away and
you’re seven-years-old
again drinking Pepsi
at the sari-sari store
next to Uncle Ulpe’s
house in Manila. And
you guzzle it down.
BAPTISM
The taller men with baseball bats, a tree branch garbled with knots,
log iron, and leftover pipe from the fence they put up last summer.
The shorter men gripping buck knives for slashing at the pig’s neck.
And ripened on a dry slop of peanuts, cornflakes, and newspaper
shavings, moiled between the washer and dryer and shelves of dust-caked
soda bottles, the pig that grew tall enough to sniff and lick the doorknob.
So, from the other side, I watched it turn and, hearing it flicker at night,
dreamt of succoring the pig’s escape. Then, they unleashed it. It
drumming its blunt, fleshy hammers through the downstairs hallway,
its high-pitched cough the air it dragged over vocal chord lathing.
Then, they prodded it across the yard and cornered it under the porch.
So with a ka-thunk the pig, then stilled in its tracks, had to watch
as one of the men crept up and dragged a knife across its neck.
They held the sullen body in their pink, craggy hands, standing up,
in order to catch its blood in a bucket. Blood Mother cooked
into a musty, black blood-food we smothered our rice in. After that,
the men heaved the body on a picnic table wrapped in Glad bags
and tape and rolled the carcass on its back and split the skin down
the long belly, its guts oozing out—all beigy, peachy, and blue like
clouds of chewed bubble-gum or the bulbs of a wilted, worn-in coin purse.
Collapsed hoses, too soft and slick to pile up, spread across the lawn
in pearly pools. Then, carefully, the men excised the gall bladder
before it broke and spoiled the meat, gallbladder curled like a finger
on a folding chair beside them while they emptied the carcass to the snout.
On the grass, the heart and lungs lay, and the throat ridged and perfect
as a staircase. And then, the new backbone a metal rod they pierced
and guided through the carcass. Tackle they hoisted onto some posts,
so—though I can’t remember exactly—they could turn the whole thing
on a spit. How it hovered for hours over the orange coals that startled
whenever the juices dripped, and the rangy smell of singed pork-meat
and charcoal slinked into our sweat, and the pork skin transluted, cells
shimmering amber and snapping easily to the touch, hot loosened fat
down our fingers, until the meat fell apart without having to hack at it.
The men, smoking packs of Kool cigarettes and piling up the empty
Schlitz beer cans, hardly mentioning a thing about the child.
ONE FOOT
Listen and you’ll hear a knock.
Watch the dust lift off the land.
Pray I give up my cane and walk.
Some wind will tear the ears off stalks
Of corn; no sound eviscerates the strand.
I listen close, but hear no knock.
Each footstep, I mill bones to chalk.
Then, sink in soot wherever I stand.
I dream I give up my cane and walk.
In nightmares, wispy pipe-roots block
The blood flow to a leaf-foot, browning, orphaned
On the stem. Listless,