The Hanged Man on the Hawthorn Tree
Bathing at night, the hanged man watched me through a crack in the wall.
Hunted me and touched himself. Just as the hoary bat feasts nocturnally
and tongues the plum of their lover’s vulva. Nothing is more judicious
than cunnilingus — after yes. Only this was not that. Marooned by the
dark, a voice sang who’s there, stammering. She was no nightingale. Answering,
the sound of Someone darting through brush, splintering. In the outhouse,
the water poured cold down my back, black cold as the roots of the
cottonwood dig in the river. Pith of midsummer, even flame can shiver.
After, I could not sleep alone: a couplet of women curled on the floor
by my bed. Coddled me like a puritan girl on the cloth of an old fever
and cough. As if being stalked can carve a child out of a woman. But I
was no child. None of us could sleep. Leaving, they wrote me a letter
that said we will miss you. Which was to say, we hope he won’t come back.
I have no such faith, I have no faith in men. When he came back, he came
dressed in the body of another man, shook off the rag of his skin in the
bush, singed with a shame that cannot burn out. Under the malignity
of moonlight, dead men make young men tread. By the thorn I swore,
scarlet in my heart: I sang to Death and Death sang the world to me.
First published in ONLY POEMS, May 11, 2025.
such beautiful dread.