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Father Max Monologue

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Because I love you, and beneath the uncountable stars
I have become the delicate piston threading itself through your chest, I want to tell you a story I shouldn’t but will and in the meantime neglect, Love, the discordant melody spilling from my ears but attend, instead, to this tale, for a river burns inside my mouth and it wants both purgation and to eternally sip your thousand drippings; and in the story is a dog and unnamed it leads to less heartbreak, so name him Max, and in the story are neighborhood kids who spin a yarn about Max like I’m singing to you, except they tell a child, a boy who only moments earlier had been wending through sticker bushes to pick juicy rubies, whose chin was, in fact, stained with them, and combining in their …show more content…

Max arching his neck with his eyes closed, now,

and licking the boy's round face, until the boy unchains the dog, and stands, taking slow steps backward through the wet grass and feels, for the first time in days, the breath in his lungs, which is cool, and a little damp, spilling over his small lips, and he feels,

again, his feet beneath him, and the earth beneath them, and starlings singing the morning in, and the somber movement of beetles

chewing the leaves of the white birch, glinting in the dark, and he notices,
Darling, an upturned nest beneath the tree, and flips it looking for the blue eggs

of robins, but finds none, and placing a rumpled crimson feather in his mouth slips the spindly thicket into another tree, which he climbs

to watch the first hint of light glancing above the fields, and the boy eventually returns to his thorny fruit bush where an occasional prick

leaves on his arm or leg a spot of blood the color of these raspberries and tasting of salt, and filling his upturned shirt with them he beams

that he could pull from the earth that which might make you smile,
Love, which you’ll find in the fridge, on the bottom shelf, behind the milk,

in the bowl you made with your own lovely

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