Noah Warren

Ram Rotting on the Hill Listeners

Perhaps because knowing—even knowing the empiric flex of my complicity, knowing the fine threads that caught me at birth and tapestry me to bodies nodding from the branch, skimming the sand, to the crushed throat and the rifle up the asshole and click, webs down which the horrors pearl slowly to collect in the white cup where like a peeled snake my brain coiled pulses— before it arrives at x, peters out in a curious beige landscape of the spirit, windless, lonely, my father— faded sculptor—fashioned me these bone glasses.

I peer through thin

ovals sawed in two scapulae sanded past ridge and grain then shellacked; femur slices hook my ears; and the four parts fold in on silver hinges, a collapsing bridge.

Precious, unwearable; and yet when the muscles tighten around my eyes and a whiteness spreads needling in from the edges of my seeing

then I slide them on, then it’s evening, rain outside, and the linen lampshade glows gently to limn the near curves of dark cherries and the garlic resting on the table.