Stacey Duff

Johnson County Poem #12

The heart has no discernible crux.
       --Haskell of Salus

We kissed in the desert
witnessed by the desert
at the desert’s altar

Morning broke
over the sand animals
and vacationers
opened their stale winnebagos

smell of fried eggs
and semen

and the desert was very
pissed
waving its magic wind
through cactus arms. Though

my entire heart is illegible
divorced from the whole
it makes two
easily readable halves

Johnson County Poem #13

Poems are for shit-kickers.
       --Haskell of Redlick Mountain

Let me make a premise: first
blood will yield the garden
and the garden produce a burst:

fertile and full of hype, the pleasure
no man can reciprocate
to that gal whose ornery eyes are--

let’s see baby, look here
yes just like that--whose eyes
pierce the toughest noggin.

Premise two is a feather
by comparison, and we won’t clarify
the bogs, but dredge them

on to a visceral blast:
priests negating the end, sandals
in flight to the cliffs of southern Spain.

Keep ‘em, bear them out. Grin
and bear the strapless devices
we delicately avoid to the point:

demon procession, the mayor perhaps
and fresh coats of mauve
flexing its shine on the water tower.

What will the pigeons do now
you ask. I don’t know
I say, and we return to bed

that malodorous sanctum you call
the altar of decompression.
Another fortnight in the blast

I confess, and the persimmons
won’t be worth shit this year:
very green, so green, and dead.

Johnson County Poem #14

I used to could feel the wind in my wrist.
       --Haskell of Stoner’s Point

The bombs are half dead
a tigress in the elevator
mourning

no one guesses

they blitz, fragrantly
passing for a joke

and the interstate shimmies
whole bodies, sometimes in two’s

extends a naked wrist, a forearm
out of the car

Must you bring me back
they reflect
to the original carbon--

rhinos on the plains of the chest
who answer

to every purple demand

Johnson County Poem #15

Let me tell you about a wedding--a virgin and a slut.
       --Haskell of Coal Hill, aka Muscadine Haskell

You pine in the flatlands:
(armadillos at dusk)
until arches and cabins
yank you back
from the waltz of maggots.

Filth brings you
to these honeysuckled fences
just like the log
memories you espouse:
pioneer homes on the banks
and hillsides aching to the hilt
beneath metronomic freeways.

Distance rattles the silver
maples, tanning
your adolescent legs

and seasons evidence sabotage.
As I let the slip
fall from your body
the infernos I foster
slap at your hip’s tattoo.

Our shack is dark finally
and night
lounges on the roof.

When mosquito hawks
chant down the palaver
of matrimony, the wedding is spun.

Say: who is expected to know
the edifice he approaches
does not welcome
another body, a building erected
for no occupant, blueprints
having no doors?

Stacey Duff currently teaches English at University of the Ozarks in Clarksville, Arkansas. His poems have appeared on-line in Conjunctions, Impossible Object, and most recently, 5_Trope. He is also the editor of Spadra Magazine, an electronic journal of poetry, fiction and hypertext.