Badger Born Amid Trouble

After a breeze through a screen door
scattered the eyebrows
from a man’s face, a door slammed
and hate was born. After the salamanders
slumped in their holes, and cowbells
without cows rang
in pasture fog. After houses
were chimneyed, and machetes
freed men of hands, after
the blast, after a stockinged
leg was lodged like a lamp in a storefront
window, badger was vomited forth
by his mother—a gutter pipe
birthing a head
of leaf mush.

All rights reserved. Reprinted with the permission of the author.