Lost in the Brush by Joey Ng

Lost in the Brush by Joey Ng

On the brown old earth’s first turn, Autumn hooves

Trampling under boughs of pungent pine

Announce our jovial folly high.

I take rest on this bed of blades, blunted

By no means of inhibition.

Each young yellow bud sits upon its thorns

Like jewels upon a weeping chandelier

Carpeting the forest floor with its mirth.

But what are we to say about arrows,

Lost in the thickets and the underbrush?

Shall we rack our minds and bodies sifting

Through dirt and deciduous residue,

Toying with chance and persistent virtues?

We leave our mark branded in pale ink

Upon our captor and guardian.

The same one that sustains us and brings us

To ends; we cut the point of our own rind.

Squabbling for means to the interior,

Bringing back but material riches,

There is no wealth to be discovered here.

With new presence, copper cables are laid,

Snaking along each chasm of the sea.

Long arduous months become fleeting days,

And with that, an even quicker terror

Arrives on steel rail and clouded iron.

What did we do to deserve this fate?

The moment they dared to dam Hapi,

Son of Horus, they turned their backs

On mitochondrial mother

And hid in her fields of flax.

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The Second Slaughter

BY LUCIA PERILLO

Achilles slays the man who slayed his friend, pierces the corpse

behind the heels and drags it

behind his chariot like the cans that trail

a bride and groom. Then he lays out

a banquet for his men, oxen and goats

and pigs and sheep; the soldiers eat

until a greasy moonbeam lights their beards.

The first slaughter is for victory, but the second slaughter is for grief—

in the morning more animals must be killed

for burning with the body of the friend. But Achilles finds

no consolation in the hiss and crackle of their fat;

not even heaving four stallions on the pyre

can lift the ballast of his sorrow.

And here I turn my back on the epic hero—the one who slits

the throats of his friend’s dogs,

killing what the loved one loved

to reverse the polarity of grief. Let him repent

by vanishing from my concern

after he throws the dogs onto the fire.

The singed fur makes the air too difficult to breathe.

When the oil wells of Persia burned I did not weep

until I heard about the birds, the long-legged ones especially

which I imagined to be scarlet, with crests like egrets

and tails like peacocks, covered in tar

weighting the feathers they dragged through black shallows

at the rim of the marsh. But once

I told this to a man who said I was inhuman, for giving animals

my first lament. So now I guard

my inhumanity like the jackal

who appears behind the army base at dusk,

come there for scraps with his head lowered

in a posture that looks like appeasement,

though it is not.

Source: Poetry (September 2009).