My stomach full of casualties of war
Mango juice, pomegranates, Asian apples,
Sweat from carpet makers tethered to fabrics of goat.
Armies of yellow jackets, armies of leprechauns,
A field in decomposition, correction,
And lavish compost bins tethered to fabrics of goat.
When I vomit, I let go
Fingernails and mucus, ear lobes and tongues,
A flaming hand tethered to fabrics of goat.
| Copyright © 2019 by Michael H. Brownstein Michael H. Brownstein’s latest volume of poetry, A Slipknot Into Somewhere Else, was published by Cholla Needles Press in 2018. |
I find this poem powerfully allusive with its hints of wars the United States has perpetrated and consequently gained access to edibles, the poem's suggestion that the very thought turns the poet's stomach. If I get this poem, am I too to feel some indigestion? But to what does "fabrics of goat" allude? Fabrics of goat, fabrics of goat,...?
ReplyDeleteI may not get it at all.
When we were on the islands in a third world Caribbean country, goats were everywhere. I looked over a flock of them after the volcano erupted again shaking the ash from their bodies and I saw fabrics from goat. I liked the image--don't know why--and it became fabrics of goat.
ReplyDeleteAnother explanation is who gets hurt the worst during war? I'd fathom to say animals like goats who do not understand anything that's going on around them, but this doesn't stop them from getting maimed and killed.
Ah, that significance behind "fabrics of goat"! I so-o-o get that. Such innocents suffer daily, in the quotidian human lives that include testing of animals, abuse of "pets," consuming animal flesh (euphemistically termed “meat”), trophy hunting, road-, rail-, & flight-kill, bycatching, netting Alpine bird migrants,...
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