.

The Blue Absorbent Towel

.
As he fillets my leg and makes a flap
above my knee of skin to sew it shut,
interns are watching closely how the cut
is perfect artistry, a suture map,
a hemisphere I’m sailing into all
alone. That pungent sea of flesh and blood
and bone is sulking in a towel. The squall
of Ahab, lashed and going down— the thud
of Long John Silver’s peg of fiction frights
me in the interim—the pale whale’s eyes
in black and white turn blue. I feel the bites
of consciousness, of coming-to with cries.
I’m drowning in the sea; I’ve walked the plank.
The sharks are smelling blood, its sweetness rank.

.

Mother in the Soil

The sharks are smelling blood, its sweetness rank
enough for bile to mingle on the floor.
Yet here I am, alive with less to bank
on, less the man, a mantra set ashore,
repeated by the gods I fight with now
in this estate. I ask him where he took
my leg. He tells me Oregon—they book
a train for waste and dump it all, allow
it to compost en masse with others’ fate–
the arms and legs and hearts and brains, release
them to our mother whence they came, abate
it all with tons of dirt in common peace.
I feel a twitch down low, a wanting urge
to catch the train, rejoin us, reemerge.

.
Train Ride

To catch the train, rejoin us, reemerge
as one no worse for wear has been a thought
I’ve had from time to time, a dulcet dirge
I doubt a soul would want to hear. I fought
with it a little, let it go, forgot
about it for the most part, but it changed
her too, enough so that she left one hot
June day, same train it seems now, rearranged
my life again. Somehow that lonesome rail
keeps singing out to me as if to say:
“You lose, old son, you lose, it’s been that way
forever and a day how things go stale.”
The blue absorbent towel is in my lap
when he fillets my leg and makes a flap.

.

.

Charles Southerland is a farmer who writes poetry and short stories. He also makes and sells walking sticks, canes and shillelaghs. He has been published in The Blue Unicorn, The Lyric, The Dead Mule, Measure, Trinacria, The Pennsylvania Review, The Hypertexts, Expansive Poetry Online, The Journal of Formal Poetry, The Ekphrastic Review, First Things and numerous other good poetry journals. He is American by birth and Scottish by heritage. He can trace his recent roots to the 1600s in Dunfermline and Torryburn in County Fife, Scotland.

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9 Responses

  1. Roy Eugene Peterson

    Interesting triptych set of interdependent poems that comes full circle with a bloody beginning and conclusion set in a blue towel! The shifting of rhyme scheme is noticeable but does not detract from the substance or earnestness of the subject. The train seems to be a metaphor for those things that left the injured leg person including the leg itself and wife. I cannot help but wonder if the one who left was responsible for the damage to the leg.

    Reply
  2. Paul A. Freeman

    What a sad picture is drawn, the MC feeling he has become a caricature like Captain Ahab or Long John Silver, less than a man even when his significant other deserts him.

    Thanks for the read, Charles.

    Reply
  4. C.B. Anderson

    It has been far too long, Charlie, since I last got a good look at your indelibly graphic images framed in syntactically complex locutions, which is just to say, Holy Smoke!. How can something be raw and hard-boiled at the same time? Only a true Arkansawyer could make such excruciating jagged cuts.

    Reply
  5. Cheryl Corey

    Very skillfully done, Charles. It took me a second reading to realize that it’s a sonnet corona, whereby the last line of the first sonnet becomes the first line of the second, and so forth, a form that’s on my bucket list.

    Reply
  7. Margaret Coats

    The crown grows more allusive and graphically gruesome at each tier, Charles. I like the many interspersed psychological and physical notes of amputation: “sailing all alone,” “bites of consciousness,” “twitch down low.” Suppose the towel is blue to indicate sadness, and that makes it an appropriate catch-all title. The opening and closing line describing how surgery is finished also forms a most appropriate completion of poetic form. Crowns have been unusually popular in recent free verse times, to their detriment. Yours is a good one, and mercifully short.

    Reply
  8. Geoffrey Smagacz

    Enjoyed these clever sonnets. The rhyme and meter didn’t call attention to itself. The use of enjambment throughout is perfect for the theme and for the way these three sonnets run into each other.

    Reply
  9. Susan Jarvis Bryant

    Charles, what excellent use of the fascinating sonnet corona form. The images are so graphic, I could smell the blood while sinking into nightmarish realms. The linguistic pictures you have painted will remain with me long after leaving this page. Very well done indeed.

    Reply

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