Saturn’s Country
S for salt, for spoiling crops. S for worse or no choice other than exodus or a territorial discourse. S for stretched out in a morgue, plastic bags like garbage you discard. S for stinking hog, onions, frenetic maggots laying their baggage. S for still you're flesh, meat butchered, bootlegged in the marketplace. S some might say you're gas sloshed from a tank. Others that first blue God doused on a tarp, hated it and left it to rot, or you’re that sound he loved so much, smaller than a cricket song. S for scalp, for the soiled search of your god. S for complete utter darkness. S for success out of the carcass. S for sloth, for sickle, for a solar system beyond sable incarceration. S for ES which is S which is señor of a thousand choruses. S for savior, for scavengers and sculptors you throw out of the temple. S for so much white- noise pressure even the cardinal won't canonize you. No, not that bird, not that pontiff, nor your arsenal. S for still to this day in your belly, in the dive of your mouth.
Copyright © 2017 William Archila. Used with permission of the author. “Saturn’s Country” originally appeared in Agni 86, 2017.