Jody Kennedy
1. She of cloven hoof and pocked face came down from the North,
crossing the border near Rainy River on a horse the color of winter
wheat and hydrocodone. She of gnarled limb and oil-soaked skin
tugged the reins and squeezed the barrel of her delicate green-eyed.
2. The hunting party loaded their rifles and broke camp in the early
morning light, pulled up tent stakes, tossed back the last mouthfuls of
bitter brew, stomped out the last flickering embers, let rip one last
piss, one last steaming blast that flattened miles of virgin-timber.
3. The Highway of Tears (that God-forsaken) creeping from Prince
Rupert to Prince George, British Columbia, Canada, plucked us like
dandelion petals because we were [hitchhiking] because we were
[drinking] because we were [wearing] dark lace and sometimes fire.
4. And other withered stumps of time / Were told upon the walls; /
staring forms / Leaned out, leaning, hushing the room enclosed. /
Footsteps shuffled on the stair. / Under the firelight, under the brush,
her hair / Spread out in fiery points. Glowed into words, then [. . .]*
5. There was one desire and then another, there was one wish for
freedom and then another, there was one cutting word and then
another, there was one fuck you and fuck off and then another, there
was one murderous rage and then another and another and another.
6. The hunting party made camp at nightfall east of the river. Beer and
whiskey were spilled, hydrocodone crushed and inhaled, rifles
emptied and polished, and stories told of tracking, circling, gutting,
stripping, and boiling down. Stories of mindless killing and plunder.
7. She of malformed breast and ghostly pale dismounted her steed and
crept from red pine to red pine to firelight. And the Demiurge once
said, lex talionis i.e. an eye for an eye and there were hoof marks on
cheeks, locusts overflowing from mouths, and the gnashing of teeth.
8. She, beautiful and verdant one, buried the hunting party in a field
alongside the winter wheat, gathered up their rifles and buried them,
too. Deer nibbled the new shoots before the deep snow fell and again
in springtime as our [broken] bodies thawed and rose & rose anew.
* from T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land"