Amy Trussell lives in California

 

Vaulted Trees

Vaulted trees
over a house of dust.
Television ashtray in the kitchen-
black and white explosions, Vietnam war .

We were smoking behind wet blankets on the clothesline.
Mom acted like a trapper in the woods smelling for game,
Putting up jam in a jackal-headed jar.

Playing bridge on Sundays with God.
Dad brought the dead dog in a wheel barrow.
Snow fell on the corn stubble
where hell’s angels gave chase to my brother.

Locusts came out of their shells
beneath the willow tree
and Dad hacked down the evil thing
to the electrified axes of a neighbor’s garage band.

With head down he mowed the lawn like a celestial bull
and nights he played the spoons to a blue record
brought the transistor to the bone yard to think
lilies of the valley, cigar-shaped fossils

and the moon hangs in the tree like a morphine drip.

 

Skull Drums

Pull back the blinds to the horseshoe nebula
And a coin belt thrown into the sky’s road
The moon beats down on grieving ankles
Sore and rubbed in rose moroc

Snake, abandon your husk at my soles
And re-seed the storm maker
That is egged deep inside
Discharge me through a pleat in the Northern sky

Wind me to the glowing acacia tree
Where the moon scrapes the hollow clean
And yellow jackets crystallize
Around a black honied hive

I see my brother in a gem cave
Wearing a deer shirt with
Red map of the world’s edge painted
We hear the throbbing skull drums

And the night’s mane wavering
Above burial mounds
An arched door is in the sky, painted, volatile
Life dissolves and it burns open

 

Flaming Tongues Of Wheat

A pack of wild pigs escapes through wheat
Cutting a mauve swath into the clouds
Creek banks are blown with thistles
And copperheads pull down into roots

Apocalyptic orange light on a grain silo
Girls smoking cigarettes and shucking corn
In halter dresses with the radio on
Later they will lie on hay bales drinking wine

Old woman that lives in the converted stone church
Opens the screen door secretly
She tongs the moon from the well
And hangs it in the cottonwood tree to dry

Here we burn our trash at night and
Our hearts marinate silently in summer’s blaze
And if some of the fire jumps out of the barrel
It brings wild fascination before we stomp it

 

Copyright © Amy Trussell