Blunt Force Trauma (Published in The Legendary Oct. 25, 2011)

Blunt Force Trauma

Nothing focuses the mind
like a good ass-kicking.
In bed afterwards, internal organs
re-arrange themselves inside the body.
A bruised spleen tickles, an exquisite
organ in its movement, second only
to the clitoris in provocation.

Granddaddy killed a cow who had turned
her uterus inside-out calving. Stove in her skull
with the back side of an axe. The calf survived;
nursed by a sharp-boned Holstein cow.

16-year-old boy half-way
ejected from a black Pinto
rolling down an embankment.
The police towed the wreck
to a garage only three blocks
from the funeral home. We gawked
past in awkward high-school neckties.
Ours was a small town.

Throw ten thousand punches
into the wooden man dummy, then
go out to eat dim-sum. A chopstick
dumpling is slick and heavy
as a new-born world.

Even after the divorce,
she still sets mouse traps
in her kitchen on occasion.