We Hunt

He housed his family.

It is darkness in the quiet: the afternoon squints in the mist, clouded. He carves shapes in wood, in marble. He carves, again—in the rear of the studio. The shapes stand erect and poised. The shapes stare. The shapes are statues.

Once, accidentally, the wooden legs of the shaped and risen king are too light, are too frail, are cracked. The queen is marble. She is untainted. She is uncracked. Her shawl is on her neck. The gods come into the hallways. The eyes seek a formed and envisioned starvation.

It is the rain. The somber dance in the rain. The somber rise. The somber are healthy. The somber are novel. They will not look as frightful as the days that have passed. We have lasted. Choir, raise my murderer to my hearth.

It is time to pray.

Marianne is fifteen. She goes to the store. She walks in short skirts and he is afraid. He has allured himself to the belief in blood—I will take skin.

Mitchell is thirteen. He sits in the basement and fills plastic bottles with lighter fluid. He sells the bottles on the corner, at dawn, to men with thick coats—tiny legs. The men stand in line and do not talk. Mitchell has a desk. He charges the men. The men pay.

Mitchell watches his sister. He makes explosives in the garden in the afternoon. He thinks to bleed the skin of the misled—the deathless.

The marble queen has watered her wooden king and the sit-in rest makes the wood burn. The roofs of mouths burn in the heated summer. The children have children legs and run with children arms to the water. The un-held: this land is the land of the un-done.

The families are patient to wait until they are pardoned—until they are excused—to untie the soiled string of men who are un-good. It is only, like the lines of plaster on the back leg of an adolescent, a trap:

We hunt unlike the rest.


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