A Brief Recap of My Last Excellent Meal







You placed four perfectly crisp, golden-brown quail,
still hot from the pan, onto my plate.We had shot them ourselves 
in a field in November. I recall the dogs -- 
one flushing the birds from dun broom sedge
while the other, its tail raised in semaphore, pointed.
They rushed and paused, swapping places,
following the scents of small things
that hide in grass, in autumn.
I watched the canine ballet, set to the drumming wings
of the covey rising into the cold sky. You aimed your gun, leading just enough
so that you found the bob-whites
 and tumbled them out of their arcing flight.
The panting dogs brought them back to us.
Now, as I lift a bird to my lips, I taste the air and the gunpowder
and the damp coats of dogs and the report of your gun
and your smile
and the field where I stood, admiring.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Conversation With a Ghost

Image
This must never get out in the press, for it would cause widespread panic. The priests would surround my house, not to mention the police and possibly the army. Castor Desayuno has come back from the dead! Yes, the butcher himself! You are saying to yourself right now, or possibly to your beloved who sits beside you in the morning sun with her hair down and a cup of café con leche in her sleepy grasp, 'Castor Desayuno cannot possibly be walking the earth. You must be mad!' You are protesting, ‘But we saw his head on the end of a bayonet, paraded through the streets of San Cristobal. We saw his body lowered, headless, into a grave over which no priest said the holy words.' But as surely as I stand before you at this moment, I saw Castor in the flesh, last night. He was a hungry ghost, desperate for conversation. He beckoned to me to sit beside him on the steps to the Shrine of the Eternal Madonna, the very one where he was cut down in the middle of fornicating wi
Read more

You Only Get One Question (first published by Anchala Studios in 2018)

Image
          I met her husband in a greasy coffee shop on the run-down side of town -- his choice. I suppose he thought the locale fit my role. I had been bedding his wife, after all. That made me trash.         He was a middle-aged tugboat carrying 300 pounds of fat on swollen ankles and too-small feet. He’d come with a bad attitude. The husbands always do. They never consider why their wives go looking elsewhere for pleasure. Or maybe they do consider, but the answer that comes back is the only one they can sit with: Some bad influence (me) is to blame for their darling Dottie or sweet little Sally-Jo going astray.         “Jesus, how old are you anyway?” he asked.         “That’s a boring question,” I said. “Of all the things you could ask at a time like this, you want a number?”         He dumped five sugar packets into some oily-looking coffee while I watched his eyes: they were kidney beans wrapped in dough.         “I mean, if you want to talk numbers, how
Read more

Market Day

Image
I just needed a little more time, a moment only, to answer Melek's question, though not to make up an answer. I had that ready. I always had the answer ready because the question was always the same. I needed time to compose my face into a mask of perfect submission. He expected women to be submissive. I turned away from the window and faced him, my eyes downcast and my posture stooped, and whispered, "No, my husband. I do not know the name of the man in the market who bumped into me and said 'Excuse me.' He was nothing. He was a nobody." I knew what his next accusation would be; by then, I could have recited this tired, familiar script in my sleep. "How did you know he was a nobody if you didn't look at him, eh? Did you raise your eyes and look him in the face? Are you my wife or a whore?" Cue the kettledrums. Cue the dancing bears. This was where I lowered my head and wailed a protest of innocence to be followed by a walloping sla
Read more