SERGEI WAS

a coarse cad of a worm

and a walking scandal.

He threw a cross

and it boomeranged.

He cursed the rood and

wished his act undone

washed his blood in a gutter

and came out clean.

Sergei stumbled up a ladder

and fell to grace.

BACKWOODS

Pa had himself quite a brood, and he was real good with words. Ma said she knowed him as

a boy swallow them like grains he let ferment in his belly. Most like moonshine in a still, Ma said.

He liked to put them together funny, like cinnabar and Zanzibar and hold them to the light, just

like they was little gems or embers at twilight. When Ma said he was prolific we worried she

might’ve caught Pa’s word disease.

None of us held Pa’s words against him. It wasn’t even that he smelled like a polecat. It was the

beatings he’d give us, Ma too, when he’d sit on the porch at night drinking his brew and getting

more and more prolific till it was so dark there was no porch, only words like Savoy and sardonic and

palingenesis and Anubis. They was his own magic brew he could pour out till the

cows came home.

The last time he got himself dead drunk some of the girls nailed him in his coffin. We was all

there to see him off. My brothers and me bore the coffin down to the hollow, and Ma said a

prayer. We took turns with the shovel till ground covered him up. Least there was no more

words, and we could hardly hear Pa’s screams as we went back up to the house.