September 24, 2018 | Occasus | Issue 8 | Poetry

The Bowerman

Bachelor Pad
brings babes
displays

Johnnie Walker, Cuervo,
Goldschlager, Schnapps.

Techs for necking:
Bose, iTunes

Baby let your hair down,         
let me run my fingers through it.

Lounge couch, leather, a
brindled cow

skin dead,
spread 

on a marble floor, cut
from a riverbed.

Silk sheets spat,
strung by worms, 

mood lighting
that glints

soft white
glow off

Trojan Groove,
spilled His&Hers lube. 

In the morning,
the Bowerman brews coffee beans

shat by a civet.
He feeds his girls,

shows them the door.
In the evening

he preens, combs
Musky Cedar Beard Oil

through his hair.
admires his ass,

his size through
the cut of his jeans, 

lopes off to bars,
pursues

females for fucking. 

Lord of the Fly

Brats. All
boney corners,

narrow chests,
scabbed stilt-

legs fly,
gliding on blacktop

sidewalks, pull 
wheelies, 

mud-flung
speeds,

drop F-bombs
for the taste.

Whelps 
yelping

SCREW YOU and
SHIIIIIIIIIIT,

cackling, wild
hairless cubs

in jeans, cracked caps, red
cotton pullovers

pint-sized Nikes.
The delegation

of kids stalk,
roam,

stake out
territory,

shirk curfew, 
bite back. 

Flanks the
weak

beats
submissive initiates

—younger brothers,
tomboys.

These boys’re
practicing.

Skinny shoulder squared,
bared teeth

punches, thrown
weight, elbows, knees,

bloody knuckles, nose,
grinning black eye.

They’ll yield
rough adults,

hard-fisted
men who

close
their fists

as soon as open
their hands.

Boy violence
at its finest.

Fargo

I read a personal essay by Annie Dillard
about weasels and tenacity,
about catching wriggling passions with an arrow head,
pinning them with needled teeth.
A weasel lives as he’s meant to, she wrote.
Yield at every moment to the perfect freedom 
of single necessity, she wrote. 
Be like the weasel. Pierce and lock those hungers
withundeterred, inseparable jaws:

encouragements for milky, lukewarm guppies like me,
hypnotized by TV, writing in the token leather-bound book
while Russel Harvard drills a hole in the ice,
while Adam Goldberg bullies Martin Freeman
who will not submit, who uses a stolen taser to escape,
to cling tenaciously, weasel-like,
to single necessity.
 
I’d like to do the same with this book, this pencil,
—sharpen my teeth on the edges, yield to perfect freedom,
take and defend,
          the white page
          these skinny, sloppy written words
—without murder-by-hammer,
chest wounds that splatter
like puddles plundered by toddlers,
without drowning in a lake
or in a bubbling slit throat,
without the bare canvas of winter in Minnesota  
          but really Calgary
and without a bowl-cut Billy Bob Thornton 
who pursues relentless.

KAELA MORIN is a fourth year Honours English student. Sometimes a writer. Sometimes a poet.