There’s a sort of silence, call it
cancer. Call it rabbit pelts, bellies
stuck with olive switches. There’s
a soft-spot, just behind the ear.
Hatchet that birthmark and you
can swallow someone whole. Us sons
have bits of daddy-skull for
adam’s apples. Some say the gravesite
has my eyes, that I come from
a family of dovetailing tumors.
When the birds arrived, we used to lynch
angels for luck. No more cigarettes
snubbed out on our spines. No more ghosts
dribbling color on our cheeks. We
went into the woods as kids. We
slit the soil like a throat.