Novelette

With her one horrid eye persistently unfastened, a vigilant bird

watched my grandfather during the Great Depression

use each evening of one whole year to wander his corn fields

knowing this world is just one pig after another

in one pen after another. Therefore, the bird heard him suppose,

shouldn’t he with his best gun, machete, Buick, or rope

terminate his acquaintance with the tiresome setup

of breakfast-lunch-dinner-dawn-dusk-fall-winter-spring-summer-

blah-blah-blah? But his girls were good-looking

and made such fine pies, so the bird watched him live wretchedly

until he died more naturally of cancer

too soon to see his people become the dopefiends, doctor-haters,

masturbators, insomniacs, sleep fanatics, shut-ins, and teetotalers

the bird knew they would become, for the purpose of girls

is to just ruin everything with wanton reproduction

so that now now now it’s really relentless—how heavy

his people got in their limbs and how torrential, thus,

the frenzied wind, though beyond the eye of the bird

is the small, ashen brain of the bird, and below that, a heart,

I swear, through which come the iffy notes of this cruel song.