"Tasks" - Robert Lee Kendrick
End day sun
seeps through primer gray
clouds, gives
the last of its warmth
to the rain
swollen creek, as a hook
necked buzzard
picks flesh from a possum
behind my truck.
One thing has to die
for another
to eat, I say to the leaves.
Some man's
shirtless son takes aim
at a headless
torso he's hung from a tree,
makes music
with knives, going straight
to the heart.
Driving home to my wife,
I'll spread
tailpipe smoke on young trees. Two years
since she miscarried.
Some chromosome rot in one of us, or both,
& no luck.
A small wake drives water
apart. A beaver
gathers mouthfuls of branches & mud,
his daily work
of patching the dam.
Robert Lee Kendrick will be featured reader at next month's Word of Mouth open mic on Wednesday, July 5. In a June 2016 interview he said of his writing that "place does it for me. The roads, creeks, and lakes of Pickens County, South Carolina, and the fields and towns of central Illinois where I grew up. I see so much road kill that I get a lot from decay and rot, as well — that’s been a big thing for about six months. Natural decay is a miracle, the biological process that nature uses to heal and renew itself. There’s no unfinished business, and I don’t know that humans can do that with loss, even with rituals, therapy, art, whatever."
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