Content Warning: death
Damon Hubbs – A Hole to Hide a Feud
Death lives upstream
And keeps a Derby spider in a matchbox,
Eight legs like dreaming power lines
Eight eyes like black burgonets.
Ours is in the grassblade waiting,
Fed on milk
A spat of saliva
Dark as an iron cap.
Death’s nose is a rotted hole.
He hangs upside down from a dried leather tree
Watching residents march a gaggle
Of geese three miles to the county fair.
From the swayback porch of Cattown Rd.
We write a childhood newspaper;
Father falls off a cord of wood,
Mother’s heart capers in a gilded cage.
Death noses the neighbor’s farm
Looking for a hole to hide a feud.
The moon rubs an ink pot on its white dress.
A column of birds give bad advice.
The neighbor is a girl in glass.
She breaks down like juvenilia,
Stomach a pitwheel of stones.
The boy from the fair wants his letters returned.
Death lives upstream
Cutting out the paper patter of our feet.
We fish Fly Creek with a bucket of bones,
Walleyed without armor, our spider dethroned.
Damon Hubbs: film & art lover / pie bird collector / lapsed tennis player / author of the chapbooks 'Coin Doors & Empires' (Alien Buddha Press), 'The Day Sharks Walk on Land' (Alien Buddha Press) and 'Fly Creek' (forthcoming in November from Naked Cat Publishing) / his poems have been featured in Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Otoliths, Roi Fainént Press, Does It Have Pockets, Apocalypse Confidential, and elsewhere / he lives in New England / @damon_hubbs
Photograph: The Fires of Bel Have Breathed Their Last by Paul atten Ash
Paul atten Ash is the pseudonym of Bristol-based poet-photographer Paul Nash, whose lens-based artwork has been published by Deep Adaptation Forum, Oscillations, and Where The Meadows Reside. Website: https://campsite.bio/northseanavigator