ABOUT

CONTENTS

EDITORIAL

ARCHIVE

LAGNIAPPE

MAST

SUBMISSIONS

Two Poems
by Adam Peterson



My Untimely Death
Number Five

My untimely death is not a choice.

But I do get a choice. My jailers bring me a list which they claim to have been long ago written in blood on human skin, but it appears to me inkjetted in maroon on bonded paper. I recognize the font as Copperplate Gothic.

It’s not the original, they claim. Only the warden can see that.

My menu is before me:

1. Firing Squad

2. Hanging

3. Electric Chair

4. Gas Chamber

5. Lethal Injection

6. Stoning

7. Drawing and/or Quartering

8. Guillotine

Oh, the jaundiced and greenily pretty guard says, we added one too. With a green ball-point he writes ‘9. loNg FaLL’ with irregular capitalization like that. I ask if that’s what it looks like on the original blood and flesh version. They hit me in the stomach. Only the warden can see that, they say, and only if he has on his special glasses.

Why not hanging? I ask.

Got rid of it after what happened to the fellow in Utah, they say.

What happened to the fellow in Utah ? I ask.

They hit me in the stomach and leave. I have the night to think about it. I lick the moss growing on the bars of my cell. It tastes like moldy bread tastes, and I know because I have moldy bread for dinner and my tongue aches from operculum. All night the black coots cry from the marshes. I find a paperclip in the corner of the cell and straighten it. I think little about my death.

At dawn the guards return and ask me to write down the number of my choice in blood so I prick my finger with the straightened paper clip and ask what flesh have you to write upon? The guards looked confused and pass me a child’s composition book through the bars. Other prisoners have written their choice in these pages and the size of the numbers vary but the color of the blood is always bright like chard. There are many blank pages left. With my bloody finger, I write a 6 of my own lineage, but the guards mistake it for a 9 and take me from my cell in a silk blindfold.

It is indeed a long fall, and I have yet to hit bottom though I have chosen, as I have chosen the method, to call it death.


My Untimely Death
Number Six

My murder is untimely, but my death takes years until I finally go an old man with hard-won notions about the morality and taste of you, the new young, that dissipate from my mind as I close my eyes—a late victim.

From a young age I was kept from climbing the poplar trees and brushing my teeth and entering the kitchen. Kept from boyhood, my parents sent me to live in a field of red poppies where the land was flat and nothing could prick my delicate skin. I slept underneath a pink blanket when the pollen made me sleepy. From long poles servants would feed me marshmallows which I ate without utensils. Everything I touched became covered with chalky powder.

When my parents saw me through binoculars I detected the disappointment on their faces over where my hands had been.

At 15 the first green of a rose bush sprouted through the ground in the poppy field and at the sight of thorns generals and spies and a gardener were called for to cut the stalk down and salt the earth where it had been. I didn’t know what was meant by rose, but the word made me quake. I imagined roses blossomed into parents. I imagined parents dropped marshmallows for seeds and the seeds would grow to stop signs and dogs and baseball games. I secretly ate the salted earth in addition to my daily marshmallows.

Then followed my assassination. The envelope awaited me as I woke. When I took it into my hands, my named scrawled in runny blue ink, it gave me a small papercut. I was murdered. A drop of blood like a fire ant fell from my finger onto an equally red poppy, and I knew I was done in. I left my field behind, knowing should I ever want to come back I could follow my own uncoagulated blood. I carried the envelope in the hand of my cut. Over time it became as red as home, but I never opened it or let it from my sight.

I aged. I had overestimated the amount of blood there would be in the streets of the world so I never found my way home. Instead I found a woman who loved me and would take my wounded finger in her mouth and suck each drop of blood until her tongue lapped at the cut for more. I think it was all she ate or drank, and I when I grew old the wound slowed to a trickle. Blood only fell from it one or twice a week, and she grew hungry. We went our separate ways.

With only one drop of blood left, I decided to solve my murder. I took up a knife for the first time and cut open the stiff, red envelope that had done me in so long ago. It was an invitation to a birthday party for the gardener who salted the earth where the rose had once grown. It was many years ago.

I have never forgiven him for the rose, but I forgive him for my death which occurred years, months, minutes, seconds before I was intended to draw my last breath of pollen and marshmallows in the poppy field.