Empathic Chef
Milling poppy seeds with your elbow pestle
won’t make heroin. The epidermis craters,
absorbing pellets like junebugs on sabbatical.
Grubby seeds are devoted to their craft.
The shoulder is green-eyed and smooth.
It plunks into the hero, the tomato seeds
all over. Cold hot mustard waits to brush
your teeth from an embossed napkin, paper
flora for hands and face. Mayonnaise ain’t
in the plans. Funds weren’t allocated. Our hero
smears itself among the believers’ ears
with nasty words, alphabetically unfeasible.
A distraction. Double talk chalking itself
into a fortress of intestines and parable.
The buns fail. The buns fall. Guts spread
like deltas. Meat makes parole. Tubers eye
escape, previously unnoticed and fried.
Let There Be Knowledge
before all this / there was nothing to do
but the dance of a veil / changing the shy
for the rhythms / of the deepest sleep
a rib is delicious / unswallow one
and wish / you’ve never been bored either
here is a seedy core / there a gristly future
why / she laughs / this was before
everybody moved away / off the grid
rewinding time / around beaten breasts
Eve / took and took and and took and taken
Adam / Rip Van Winkle without
his ambiguous beard / a drowsy masher
in the days before wine / or love
only man squashed excuses / with his feet
she bruised like an apple / snake’s got no fists
don’t pray for forgiveness / but for clothes
trendy and timeless / with waists that stretch
when the babies come like thunderclouds
and the mud will instruct / the burials
and the mud will welcome / sowing
an orchard / sways crisp in the wind
JR Walsh is the Online Editor at The Citron Review. His writing is in beloved publications such as New World Writing, Litro, Juked, Hobart, HOOT, Rejection Letters, FRiGG, Blink-Ink, B O D Y, The Hong Kong Review, The Greensboro Review, and Esquire. For more: itsjrwalsh.com.
