Back to Issue Thirteen.

COCKSHUT

BY TYLER KLINE

 

n. the close of day; evening; twilight

Hour ghosts boil bark into cool water
for a town to rub on its burns.
Hour dogs pass to mountain shale
then back to hunter below a half-gone moon.
Hour the pastor’s hand becomes a bride
confessing to a diamond lost
and found in the parish boy’s boots.
Hour a fox crossing the porch
sounds not unlike a widow sweeping straw.
Hour grace is left playing with matches,
hour the sun drags out the moon
to stand against a tree and shoot.
Hour the chickens get their names,
the thistle their thorns. Hour a truck
drives like an ocean in peacetime,
hour the coyote bums a smoke ring
from the boy growing his father’s hands.

Tyler Kline is the author of the forthcoming chapbook As Men Do Around Knives (ELJ Publications, 2016). A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, his work has appeared or is forthcoming in Apogee Journal, Whiskey Island, Radar Poetry, and Winter Tangerine Review. He works on an organic vegetable farm and studies Secondary English Education at the University of Delaware.

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