It Hurts To Burn

Winter and I traded poems that scare the shit out of us. I came up with the Levertov; Winter threw in the Capps. It's poems like these that make me feel like we are all of us unforgivable and ugly and cruel. The least we can do is tell it like it happens, bear witness. But how little the testimony lends, how far we have to go.



Watching Dark Circle
Denise Levertov

"This is hell, nor am I out of it."
Marlowe, Dr. Faustus


Men are willing to observe
the writhing, the bubbling flesh and
swift but protracted charring of bone
while the subject pigs, placed in cages designed for this,
don't pass out but continue to scream as they turn to cinder.
The Pentagon wants to know
something a child could tell it:
it hurts to burn, and even a match
can make you scream, pigs or people,
even the smallest common flame can kill you.
This plutonic calefaction is redundant.

Men are willing
to call the roasting of live pigs
a simulation of certain conditions. It is
not a simulation. The pigs (with their highrated intelligence,
their uncanny precognition of disaster) are real,
their agony real agony, the smell
is not archetypal breakfast nor ancient feasting
but a foul miasma irremovable from the nostrils,
and the simulation of hell these men
have carefully set up
is hell itself,
and they in it, dead in their lives,
and what can redeem them? What can redeem them?





I Used to See Her in the Field Beside My House
Ashley Capps


Perhaps it is the way your nipples,
long like fingers on an open hand,
beckon the tired, huddled, osteoporosis-fearing
masses to your swollen, steaming milk sack.

The skin of your huge behind ripples
where giant horseflies understand
only that you taste good, not that they hurt you while you're looking
at the vast and swirling pasture through a crack

in your stall. Cow, listen— forget the deep pools
of rain that pock the lit, green land-
scape of your youth. Forget the singing
man who rubbed your head. He's readying the rape rack.

In the end, you're skinned and processed. A hip pulls
loose, shoulders dismantle in the hands
of some masked worker. Old girl, there is nothing
in this world that loves you back.