Ryan G. Van Cleave
Como rosas Hechas de Látigo/Like Roses Made of Whips
Like hunters eager after prey in pine shadows
and early morning fog, my brother and I rushed
through the poplars and oaks behind the new high school
we wouldn’t go to for three more years, our eyes prying
into every socket of tree-dark and leaf-shade,
wondering if there or over there were hidden traces
of his passing, this drunken passer-through who beat up
our cousin Mark, had pulped his nose, half-ruined one eye,
crushed his testicles in a bar fight the night before.
Cops impounded his jacked-up truck, but the stranger fled
on foot this way, eluding pursuit like black fireworks popping
against the night. We had our father’s hunting rifle with us,
a Winchester with a scope. We had knives. We had some rope.
For four or five hours, we combed those woods and the fields
behind them, laughing about thunderclouds that looked
like light bulbs, wishing we’d brought more food
than a pair of tiny green apples. When we went home
to play Smash-up Derby with our bicycles, we heard sirens
and found out, much later, that the stranger had holde up
in the old fire-bombed church’s basement. To this day
we joke about our little posse, our foolish vengeance-errand
all for our cousin who’d started the fight without warning,
a bottle to the stranger’s head. My brother and I laugh and laugh
but after, I never sleep well. I know what would’ve happened
had we found that man. The bulletcrack that almost-was
thunders in my ears, impossible to silence, resounding.
Page(s) 38
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