IN THE BELLY
Soft gobs of blue-edged flame dropped like blood, like living light, from the jug at the end of a stick he was waving and running toward the edge with. The scotch, the J&B, that slid down my back with soda felt hot though it was cold. It was dark in Amber Lakes, on Coosawattee Drive. Her hair fell across a green eye as she looked at me. One puppy was black, one puppy was white, like books without pictures. At the end of the street lay a drainpipe and pumpkins we rolled and saw under, those pale smelt secrets. A shack with oils and thick medicines in tiny rusted jars I pocketed stood at the other end and we saw a black racer that day across the tall yellowed summer grass. Somebody’s little black dog got run over in the street. Its heart was out, bright and piercing. No one lived in the shack but the murder clown kicked the man in the suit and hat off the roof or the man in the suit kicked the face of the clown into nothingness at the top of the building in the black and white city in the movie on tv. My brother was dead, I had no idea of it, and the softness of the gobs was fascinating.
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THEODORE WOROZBYT is the author of The Dauber Wings (Dream Horse Press, 2006), Letters of Transit, winner of the Juniper Prize (The University of Massachusetts Press, 2008), and Smaller Than Death (Knut House Press, 2015). The City of Leaving and Forgetting, his most recent chapbook, appears in Country Music.
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Read more by Theodore Worozbyt:
Poem from Smaller Than Death
Poem from Letters of Transit