Fat Tuesday

Find me where crawfish scoot like buckshot backwards
never looking where they're going
in jet stream plumes of rich ditch silt

fat black spermy silhouettes scatter
detached swollen heads
from their aquatic third leg
remind us all where it is we came from

the culvert a womb guarded by angry turtles
and stinging anythings
that dark visage the magnetic pull

in red fringe gills glued to these thrift store pleats
slithering between your muddy thighs still
holding the last Spring storm's wet kiss

Holy Spirit speaking in fits and fissure beneath
this cracked plastic my dispassionate gaze
spitting bursts of hot static from
soul's last hiding place

and in heaps I took him with me

a violence in need of whisper
throng of faceless children singing hymnal cheer
a reckoning beside dirt road
   and cow pasture
bastard baptism on this the last day of our sin.


TA