Erin Samantha Hanson

Lakedog

Stupid, grim thing,
all rumination and oblivion.
Ugly girl, home is the first place
you learn to die.

The lioness is also the carcass she feeds to her children—
bloody womb-flesh,
weaned on the belief of the
anomaly of ruin.

Your father is a bird feather,
purple-blue
lost hiker on the lost highway.
He isn’t coming home until the road ends.
Walk down to the corner store and meet him there in the backroom oblivion.

You’re looking for your father in your mother’s footsteps—
fallen out of a pocket
in her flower beds,
under.
Griefness is her rosebeds
and fertile
more cared for than you.

yhwh yhwh yhwh
Your tongue spits yhwh,
your mother is only mary.
Black-pit stomach
flesh-eating fungal,
fleshless, faceless
when your mother tells you she was seventeen.

You, thief of childhood
swallower of innocence.

Daughter of an ageless father
he was already a white-footed christ,
phantasmic lover-maker.

Say: Dear Mother, Pietà-bitch.
One day I’ll be roadside carrion.

Your father wasn’t a communal drinker.
Did he leave for cigarettes or bread?
Green, moldy loaf
blue as lakedogs—
drowned, loyal mutt.
Come home, Lassie. Come home.

You’ve been home your whole life.