Jeff Burt
Jeff Burt lives in Santa Cruz Country, California. He has a digital chapbook available, Little Popple River , from Red Wolf Editions, and a print chapbook, A Filament Drawn so Thin from Red Bird Chapbooks. He has previously contributed to Sheila-Na-Gig online.
Tat
She sewed with threat,
the needle picking up
flesh as if to rip it,
placing dots and furrows
in precise zigzags
to close the bean pod-
sized wound at my elbow,
a ferocity that told me
how stupid I had been,
how angry and harmed
she felt for my mistake,
the first scar on perfect
seven-year-old skin
she cooed, temper
cauterizing the scar.
On the Night the Pond Would Freeze
The report would say she was in torment
which was more the state of those
who abused her than of her condition.
She had stripped off her clothes
and walked naked into a field
of yellow gourds in early October
high and exhausted
from picking hundreds of red peppers
by hand for three straight days.
On the night the pond would freeze
and a thin scrim of ice form,
she showering the plundered rows with quotes
from the Sermon on the Mount
giving us a perpetual finger.
She said she looked desirable
in the half-moon light,
and did, not sexually,
but in the way an animal once caged
is set free, and forty yards from metal
realizes the lack of containment
and circles in astonishment before vanishing.
When she sat on an old wooden perch
in the middle of the barren field,
we covered her with a blanket,
listened to her mumble a professor
suggesting eroticism in her plain
daily description of farmwoman chores,
then vaguely of incest.
Two of us sat the night with her
on that lookout bound in blankets
like larvae in cocoons.
When dawn came like a broom
sweeping up the darkness from the fields.
she said it was the peppers made her speak,
seeping through the cuts on her skin,
not liquor, not weed, the pain
that brought her to wander
and shed, quote messages
of beauty and assurance.
Did I mention my uncle, she asked,
and we nodded, yes.
She drew the blanket over her mouth,
as if to pull the truth back in,
then withdrew it.
We sat until the starlings flew.
then withdrew it.
We sat until the starlings flew.
