DEVIL UNDERSTANDS DELIGHT’S ABANDON by Charlie Clark
I like how people still use the phrase dead of night.
It makes the night seem more exciting
and them more resigned to becoming ghosts as they move through it,
though no less oblivious to the fox skirting those trees waving
like two anemic legs shorn to the bone and waiting for the wind to break
them, though for the battery of their lives they have eked out
enough of something good here that walking with my child as she sings sugar
to her heart her heart doesn’t sink to see them.
Of all the sensitive documents I have eaten,
this one remains the freshest. Like that place on my leg
where the wound was. I still touch it roughly just to show the pain
is gone. It feels like dancing atop a frozen river with someone
on shore watching, waving above their head a branch as pointed as an antler,
as though that were the only thing you needed to keep you safe.
- Published in Issue 17