The Vale of Malevolent Volume
unmythologically we dragged the bodies
there to find themselves finally bodies
backward dragged them over the leaves’
unrest limbs trussed in our perforated thirst
in blackness the moon like a nail snatched
from bed their heads with nowhere to turn
but the backs of our throats which were
everywhere throats once such baskets
of holy and hopesburrow then hornets’ nests
of nameinvain then hammer doors and fists
fastening sounds we made were the fiction
of us reciting itself until all our bark was
callous perhaps at last our loudlack
worried them sick the cities were hard
to remember not long after we killed
the lights not long before we plunged them
darkly under claws our concrete scrabble
tunneled under the suburbs and stormed
the stairs and stories and stories of children
here when knots of fingers slipped from root
and crag when we molar nagged the ankles
married bone to bone we understood their
outbursts what a tongue would not contort
enough to soothe we knew that noise
as well as we knew our swarm at last to be
a denser compaction of lightlessness
than any against which their terror raked
itself raw our jaws recorded their melancholy
for flailing which we engraved on the forests
we recognized the cries we didn’t pretend not
to hear them hearing did not make us want to stop
From The Malevolent Volume (Coffee House Press, 2020) by Justin Philip Reed. Copyright © 2020 by Justin Philip Reed. Used with the permission of the Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Coffee House Press, coffeehousepress.org.