Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

     “But why is the cross on fire?” he asked his father, or at least he thought this white-sheeted man was his father. “What?” he answered. His voice, high as a boy’s, barely rose above the sound of the Star Spangled Banner erupting from speakers mounted on top of the flatbed truck.

     When his father said “What?” the mask rippled on his face, causing his eyes to sink farther behind the crudely cut holes.

     “The fire,” he said (broad-bull-bodied-bear-bellied men were marching about its base with torches held level with their pointed caps) - “Why is the cross on fire? Lit”  - he said - “like that?”

     His father -or at least the man he thought was his father - still did not answer. He did eventually speak. The boy leaned closer to catch what it was. He said: “Ain’t that something?”- with a finality to it, a slight rising of the last syllable of the last word - as he contemplated the flames rippling up and down the glowing feed sacks they had wrapped the cross in earlier that day. The rings of orange and blue fire rose from the base and spread out like the peculiar, walking rings of electricity on a jacob’s ladder; and the boy watched until his eyes watered from the heat.

     The son shifted his gaze and saw his mother - or the woman he thought was his mother - standing with four other women on the edge of the corn field, the mud covering their high heels so that the red, straw-flecked soup lapped around their ankles when they shifted weight. One woman held a pale little boy on her hip. “I want some gum,” he whined, and he laid his head upon her shoulder and coughed.

     “But why is the cross on fire?” he asked his mother, and she turned away like a highschool sweetheart and whispered something to the woman standing beside her.

     “Oh, I have a run in my hose!” she cried, and the other women laughed as his mother - or the woman he thought was his mother - found a vial of nail polish in her purse and proceeded to lift the hem of her dress and paint the run. She brushed away the mud with the side of one long-fingered hand as she painted, then she sank her shoe back into the ooze.

Somewhere south of them
was a riot, a Mardi Gras
of gashed faces. But here among
pine trees and mummified sunflowers,
here among corn shocks, field stones
and rusted cans, someone stabbed a handkerchief twice
and stared through it into darkness; someone
cupped a cannonball to her breast and called it
the head of Jesus; someone set hate loose
like a cockroach in a child’s ear saying:

“We are legion, and we are
far away from the sea.”

His father and mother sat together in a dank room talking about the end of the world. Both were shivering from the cold. Both were slightly drunk. They could not hide the swatches of black and yellow hair at the base of their bellies, the veined turtle head of his father’s penis, and his mother’s pendulous breasts. Down the hall, in the living room, the man on the television advertised televisions, his pitch like the fine print in a dictionary. He heard his mother raise her voice, then cry like a high school sweetheart left dateless at the prom. Then the son crept through the dark, turned the television down, and heard the sirens.