The Good Butcher
The good butcher ignores the bones.
He seeks out the soft tissues,
the parts that hold parts together.
He has set the saws aside.
He reaches for the broad cleaver.
It will do for cutting sinew,
for exploring the spaces
ligaments and tendons conceal.
Whatever holding on was had,
the butcher has disjointed,
disassembled, disunited.
Yet nothing is broken or hewn.
He stacks the once familiar flesh
in the cold room. Except the chest,
whose intact ribs, he hangs on hooks.
____________
Lunar Explorer
“Now I am drinking the moon,”
Jimmy age six said one night when
we sat outside after dark,
when the crickets were crisp
musicians coming closer,
and the fireflies as thick
as stars were forming their own
kinetic constellations
as if eons were passing
just above the uncut grass.
Jimmy was tilting his glass
of Coke at an angle that
caught the moon glow, another
ricochet for sunlight
held for a moment in his
small tight hand. He chugged it
down then he made a sound
like a distant train, high
then low, then high again,
as the fizz went up his nose.
“That’s how the rocket sounds
when it tries to land,” he said.
He sat the drink on the table.
He clapped his hands loudly.
“Then it crashes in a crater,
but it’s the moon that explodes.”
____________
Paul Jones has published poetry in many journals including Poetry, 2 River View, Red Fez, River Heron Review as well as in cookbooks, in travel anthologies, in a collection about passion (What Matters?), in a collection about love (…and love…), and in The Best American Erotic Poems: 1800 – Present (from Scribner). Recently, he was nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and two Best of the Web Awards. His chapbook is What the Welsh and Chinese Have in Common.
A manuscript of his poems crashed on the moon’s surface April 11, 2019 as part of Arch Mission’s Lunar Library delivered by SpaceIL’s Beresheet lander.
Jones serves as Board Member at Large for the North Carolina Poetry Society and is Vice President of the Board of Trustees for the North Carolina Writers Network.
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