Abandonment
I watched Uncle Walt pull a fake tittie
out of his inner flannel shirt,
present it to my father like a gift
he ought to bow and scrape for.
Dad laughed and pulled at his beer,
I went off to watch the older kids
fucking behind the old milk house
on the hay left over from years
and years of farming but the farm
had been abandoned—plows still set
in the high grass beside the stone wall,
bob-wire stuck in gray old fence posts
while my brother pumped at a red-haired
girl who threw her head back like a horse
straining at a bit only she could feel,
his white cheeks glistening with sweat.
Farm gone, girl gone, Uncle Walt gone
brother/dad unreachable for reasons known
and unknown; I look back through time
and see myself touching myself,
eight years old, consumed by guilt and fire.
How One Word Connotes a Star
Great White sang something about traveling
across your state line. You'd recently
demilitarized your zone with a razor. The idea
had some appeal. Your sunflashed dad and his short-
barreled shotgun proved us too young. I slipped
my cold hand hipward and he busted out the door
in sweatpants and a camo jacket to say
Nice night kids. Lookit that moon!
Hitched his pants skyward and coughed.
I returned my hand to your safe shoulder.
He went to bed dog-howling nervous;
the bedroom light stayed on all week.
In the night sky your navel supernovaed
to the rhythm of my probing tongue
and flared like cinnamon in my mouth.
We lit out for a galaxy of trembling we
worked all night to reach it while the stars
tittered behind their stone-white hands.
Rusty has published poems, stories, reviews and essays in many places, most recently Post Road, Small Spiral Notebook, Barn Owl Review, Lit Up. His collection of flash fiction, Breaking it Down, came out last year from Sunnyoutside Press. He cofounded and oversee’s the lit journal Night Train (www.nighttrainmagazine.com) and maintains a webspace at www.rustybarnes.com.