Poetry:
Julian Mithra
Marooned by Organs[1]
hooee bighorn or prongbuck
i’m fat for backs hunched
against arctic. Beacham’s off
collecting buffalo pies
to hold back toothache
pain, a furrow for hide-hunters
to finger when we run
out of bullets
and spit
hormone circles, panting, free range
through rabbitbrush lungs
and cliffrose kidneys
gait, the kind of country
broken by ditches and ravines
and cantering
as hard as anything
bloodsoak, intestine, windpipe
between pink flesh, gorges fill
with patches of ash
from when we burned lust
from rut to rut, grunt and bark
gunoil-slick crack slurping
dick’s rank growth
inside his skin
a grange of muscles
tethered to muscles
Taxidermy (for Teddy)[2]
Big boisterous boy
Even Grannie
Any stick would do,
Then he’d flail his
One squawk or peep, a
If it proved
Or subject us to
Father found him a
Mother marveled that he
never found
twice failed
cut off
queer, erratic
fatal mistake
very small
long, tedious
favorable place
so gently
as much joy in the mud.
to forbid him aiming sticks.
and sharpened to a point.
attempts at subduing the prey.
revealing their hiding place.
he would pout.
demonstrations of quartering.
for taxidermy.
placed a marble in each socket.
Julian Mithra hovers between genders and genres, border-mongering and -mongreling. Unearthingly (KERNPUNKT) excavates forgotten spaces. If the Color Is Fugitive (Nomadic) escapes frontier taxonomies. KALEIDOSCOPE (Ethel) flexes against constraints. Read recent work in Arriving at a Shoreline, warm milk, Punt Volat, The Museum of Americana, newsinews, and Storm Cellar.
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[1] Italicized selections are borrowed from an essay, “The Mule Deer or Rocky-Mountain Blacktail” by Theodore Roosevelt, as reprinted in Outdoor Pastimes of an American Hunter. New York: Scribner’s (1905)[1893]
[2] The center phrases are excerpted from Theodore Roosevelt’s “Hunting in the Cattle Country” in Hunting in Many Lands, a publication of the Boone and Crockett Club (1895)
Heavy Feather Review 