By Robert Rinehart
You have to work them down into the earth.
Some lay crossed like stitchings
of pastry. Chiaroscuro
patiently wait to bleed
in cool shadows, bosky overlaps,
but that usually tries patience.
Think of your fingers as a chef's:
pulping packed flakes of fish,
say, pulled straight from their tin,
finely minced into tender mush,
tuna fish salad.
You can just taste
the savour as earth meets bony
ash & meal stippled coal,
nutrients diffusion bubbling,
coffee grounds percolating on to angel
food cake, gesso.
Just work it in. Take your
time: it's undoing thousands
of years of ingraining. Make
it last, this prelude to
prepare the soil. As you knead fish
flesh, crumbled meat,
cracked like a creation
made by Titans, crude white
base, textured sieves colored to
finish. Tangs of rotting succulents:
fruit-plums melting freshen the earth.
—
Robert Rinehart lives in Aotearoa New Zealand. Work has been included (or forthcoming) in Swamp Ape Review, Mayhem, New Feathers Anthology, Sky Island Journal, North Dakota Quarterly, Maryland Literary Review, La Piccioletta Barca, Cottonwood Journal, and Syncopation, among others. robert-rinehart.com