You Must Remember This. Michael Bazzett

In Vladivostok

      The woman in the dream

      said be careful with your cock

      and I suddenly knew

      in the way one knows in dreams

      that my cock had somehow become

      a lever that might detonate

      a string of bombs riddling the city

      in the way blood clots might lace

      a body in its final days.

      When I realized I was holding

      a rooster, I did not exactly

      know what to say. Perhaps

      I smiled. I don’t know.

      There was no mirror

      and I’ve never been able

      to see myself in dreams.

Cyclops

      The story is such a story we don’t always stop to think

      about what it was like to be there: that cavern floor

      packed with pungent dung, dark as the inner bowels

      of an animal when that slab dropped into place: how

      utterly it sucked to hear the oaf stirring in his stupor

      made uneasy by wine mixing with the bolted flesh

      of good friends dispatched while we watched—

      it was just a flat-out bad deal for everyone involved.

      Polyphemus messed with no one: a law unto himself

      there in the hinterland eating goat cheese by the ton

      and Odysseus brimming full of the sauce of himself

      after out-clevering all Ilium by nestling in the stallion.

      He’d had plenty of time to think there in that hollow

      belly smelling of fear and fresh sawdust holding his

      piss in one endless clench counting droplets of sweat

      rivering cold over his ribs and under his breastplate.

      And now here he is again groping for his sharpened

      pole in pitch dark using one appetite to feed another.

      He lays the point in the drowsing embers and jostles

      it enough that the cave appears in a blood-warm glow.

      You probably know the rest—plunging the blackened

      tip through the eyelid, the crackling hiss as the eyeball

      burst, the geyser that shot from the socket—then huge

      hideous blind rage: it was easy to get inside, he thought,

      the real trick comes in the getting out: words that might

      land differently if you are not clinging to the fetid locks

      under a ram, knees pinning its rib cage, your hips held

      high as it drags you slowly into the chill morning air.

      Maybe then you’d feel the warmth of Polyphemus’s

      wounded breath, washing across three thousand years

      as he crouches above you, stroking the woolly backbone,

      inquiring why this particular one lags so far behind?

The Field Beyond the Wall

      We walk to the edge of town: there

      just beyond the wall we see clouds

      of crows and ravens, also buzzards

      teetering down to pick apart the flesh

      that peeks from every flapping shirttail.

      See that belly pale as risen dough?

      The dark oaks creak with the dead

      weight that hangs from their limbs—

      ropes taut with bodies barely turning.

      We gather on the wall, idly and in pairs,

      looking out across the charred fields

      and the smoking timbers of a farmhouse.

      By noon, the hum of flies will lull our ears

      into dreaming orchards thick with bees,

      but now in the chill of morning it is mostly

      the scrape and croak of birds just starting in.

      Someone has knotted an enemy banner

      to the tail of an ass to drag the muddy lanes.

      But the ass stands rooted in a ditch,

      shredding weeds with a ripping sound.

      Up on the wall, a woman works the crowd,

      making the rounds with a steaming sack of corn.

      People buy a roasted ear for warmth,

      holding it snug inside their hands for a long while

      before peeling back the damp husk.

Memory

      It was not yet light.

      I heard my father stir.

      I crept downstairs

      in my pajamas to listen

      as he sent my brother

      to find his spirit animal:

      If it is a crow it is a crow,

      and you will not go hungry.

       I want it to be a bear

      or a wolf, my brother said.

      If it is a crow it is a crow,

      murmured my father.

      The door whuffed shut

      and cold ascended the stair.

      After a long moment

      I walked into the kitchen

      where my father sat.

      I want to seek mine, I said.

      Your what? he asked.

      My spirit animal, I said.

      He laughed and pointed

      to the broom closet.

      Check in there, he said.

       Maybe the mop bucket

       will be able to teach you

      how to hold your water.

      Very funny, I whispered.

      My father shrugged,

       What do you expect?

      You’re a closet Slovakian,

      and your brother is simple.

       Last week at the library

      he checked out the phonebook.

      As my father spoke,