Sexy in the Food Chain
Murietta says, "I want to show you the best part of being dead."
If ever desire was unconstrained....
No blanket. In their dirtiest clothes they lie supine in the dry foxtails
a mile below the Tehachapi wind farm—distant propellers whirl. From the trunk
she pulls a gallon ziplock of rotten cabbage and shrimp tails, XXX
scrawled in silver calligraphy across the bulge. When Murietta pours
the black bait to the dirt around them, dust. Scavenger weather:
stench and their stillness brings the turkey vultures circling in two by two,
gliding in non-concentrics like a slab of dough bolted lazily to the sky.
Here, amongst the homemade rank and at the end of a feathered gyre, their hands
fill each other. Fingers weave in the dirt, and they are ravenous with a cautious hunger.
Like anyone, they have each desired to be devoured.
Copyright © 2018 Douglas S. Jones. Used with permission of the author. This poem originally appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Fall-Winter 2017.