david starkey - three poems


The King's Head

Mrs. Smith bites into her pickled egg.
Evan Jones calls for another pint of Welsh.

Behind the bar, Jenny shakes out a smoke;
Three eager lads reach towards her with a light.

Mrs. Smith bites into her pickled egg.

After a fresh row with his wife, Harmon
Slogs in, stands trembling at the door.

Evan Jones calls for another pint of Welsh.

The Reverend Gareth Griffith shakes off rain
From his great coat and gulps his nightly Scotch.

Mrs. Smith bites into her pickled egg.

A boy runs in to fetch his Dad, but the heat
So startles him he sits and then forgets.

Evan Jones calls for another pint of Welsh.
Mrs. Smith bites into her pickled egg.

	(originally published in The MacGuffin)


Star of Bethlehem

Helping two old friends move out
I recall why marriages fall apart

Only a few hours of day remain
And still the van is half-empty

Their faces are crisscrossed with sweat
The six packs are all gone

"Damn," she remembers, "the attic"
Bare-chested, he bangs up the ladder

"Your junk," he swears
And, grunting, hands it down

A broken toaster, a plastic rose
Moth-eaten baby clothes

Then cartons marked "xmas stuff"
A score of them at least

Lights and garlands and plastic wreathes
And ornaments! everything light

As an armful of winter wind
"Such shit," he says, aiming the last

Box straight at her.  A silver star
Falls free and shatters at her feet

Her astonished eyes become my wife's
"Your spending sickens me"

I told her last Christmas Eve
Drunk on rum by the nativity scene

	(originally published in The Greensboro Review)


At the Zoo

The animals are breeding once again.

A nest of roseate spoonbills chirping.
Phalanger young (eyes quarter-size and blank)
Sucking hard their mother's bleeding breast,
Wild hogs nudging their piglets' dainty legs
Towards the slop: so much work to keep them
Alive, these tiny things, and yet so soon
They're grown and shipped off to another zoo;
Or, if they're weak, at night they disappear
Behind the glowing anaconda house.

The zoo is for your family, TV
Ads intone, and hordes of families
Intuit that it's so.  In shorts they roam
Among the shit and bogus habitats,
Pushing strollers, holding sweaty hands.

One girl, hair curled, rubs her Whitesnake shirt
Against her man.  She fawns all over him.
Her eyes glow peacock blue, or that color,
Rather, of the rumps of female baboons when,
In high estrus, they, shrieking, fly
Across their cage at anything that moves.

	(originally published in The Chattahoochee Review)

unframe this page