Garbage Collection: San Miguel, GTO
Barely out in front
of occupational deafness
and death by hardnosed parasite
and never having been slowed
by systemic malaise
or pity
and never having considered
the concept or consequence
of routine
the bell clanger daily crawls his alert
street to alley
calling the faithful
from neighborhood home & hooch
Clang for your miasmas
Clang for your peels & crusts
for your fester & penance
your instinct to purge
and
purge again
Clang for whatever
you can stuff into a plastic sack
and scurry with
toward his idling municipal truck
Above Chenalho
Above Chenalho
Above the valley floor
and the priestless church
Above the staccato bells
and the bells ignored
Above the penitents
shuffle strung
serpentine along the cemetery road
Above the splayed drunks
the curs
and the curs hounded
under stone troughs
Above the cement and rebar altars
Above the maize gods
and the contradiction
of huitlacoche
Above the acacia
and the acacia fruit
gnashed by Brahma bulls
in sown fields
and fields fit for stones
for stones and
coursing rain
Above the river
Above aspirated Tzotzil
and red tassled curanderos
Above the ratcheting sugar press
the human spoor
browns to black
Beauty
She my everlasting despite
deep and practiced betterness
and quietude
carps from our sofa and across
the dhurries and waxed table:
beauty:
her
nestle
her chamberment
her quid pro quo
in our helter-skelter
a third year compensatory
that I don't quite
can't truly
don't know diddly about
this loveliness she makes
to live by and through
sconced and posed
composed
in draped celadon coverlets
pots of trained sansevieria
man-moth masks
wayang puppets
& one home-scaled Frida figurine
defiant on our sideboard
all sculpted antlers
bloodied ceramic arrows
and wounds
obvious
outrageous
suppurating
Jungle Life
There where the croaking
pokes out
from the inchoate
the vestigal
There in the palpable horizon
in globule & rivulet
in the hemorrhagic gush
pooling
beyond absorption
There in the moldy coalescence
and vaporous ooze
in the nameless viscosities
and horrific bobbings
There in the leaping
venemous
yellow toadiness
and billion noteworthy toxins
tongued forth
and spittled to the heart
There where all are forced
to dwell in their hairless
creatured bags
There
where none can vanquish
their squirmings
their greeny genesis
There
the jungle rises
through cress through spiky palmetto
through what we cannot hold
at bay
Jeff Schiff is author of Anywhere in the Country (Mammoth Press), The
Homily of Infinitude (Pennsylvania Review Press), The Rats of Patzcuaro (Poetry Link), Resources for Writing
About Literature (HarperCollins), and Burro Heart (Mammoth Books). His work has appeared internationally in
more than seventy periodicals, including Grand Street, The Ohio Review, Poet & Critic, The Louisville Review, Tendril,
Pembroke Magazine, Carolina Review, Chicago Review, Hawaii Review, Southern Humanities Review, River City, Indiana Review,
and The Southwest Review. He has taught at Columbia College Chicago since 1987.
