the snow – Damien Ark
January 31, 2020
(written in 2020)
the snow won’t melt
it just builds up
four inches today
a foot more tomorrow
i pray for you
then i drink it down
i get so trashed
every last tree, like skeletal fingers
sticking halfway out of a frozen river
there’s an american flag razored to shreds
by sharp poison branches with thorns
leaking ebony blood through each star
i put my flashers on
scrape more ice off
and take pictures on my phone of
the factory smoke drifting over the frozen lake
muddy slush soaked into my socks
driving barefoot and toes freezing
you should see the camps
in thin crevices under bridges
i hand a woman two hand warmers
a water a shampoo a deodorant a tampon
a pillow a blanket
and she tells me to fuck off with my
mental health support bullshit
when i get home i text you
and the snow is halfway up the door
when the snow melted
thirty levees broke
a bomb cyclone hit
and two thousand homes were destroyed
by the time the flood was gone
it was winter, with more snow
the mist freezes the roads
the sun is caged for the next four months
we drift around hopelessly
frostbitten bloody knuckles
i wait for a text back
but it’s never the one i need
and then there’s another bottle
it’s 1AM i’m not done drinking
we were fortunate in that it only flooded our laundry room
the washer emitting smoke and fire alarms beatboxing
trying to save our clothes before our bodies are incinerated
they dropped hay from planes for horses stranded in flooded rural towns
wastewater plants collapsed and the entire counties sunk into rivers of shit
tens of thousands of houses sunken, all your precious belongings
you cannot fathom the scent of the heaping shit
with houses, camps also glided
into the missouri river
it’s miserable, feeling this fucking helpless
camps outside of religious shelters
that turn away the youth, people of color, queers, addicts
& hundreds of refugees displaced by a slumlord
after already being displaced by their home country
with another slumlord on a mission to gentrify
every last street a homeless person has slept on
there’s a girl i know living in a shed
with no door and busted wooden panels
right outside of an abandoned house
that torrented into flames in a meth lab explosion a while back
a mattress in each room, molded to the floor
a layer of ice over the soiled waste on it
tents slashed up in the backyard and half-buried in snow
she lives here getting sold around by SRO’s
that lie about being veterans
her unmedicated schizophrenia
constantly being raped on emergency blankets
slamming meth with child rapists that give her attention
cutting herself if she can’t get her fix
she was twenty and homeless when i first met her
and now she’s twenty-three, still on the same street corners
but i still haven’t lost my faith in her
i wake up naked on the sofa
turkey and deer in grandma’s backyard
feral cats squeezing through the decaying wooden fence
knocking over lavender tea as i squeeze into my boots
six inches of styrofoam cotton coming down
from an ashtray in the bruised sky
there’s a confederate man in a red truck plowing the neighbor’s driveway
with red stripe in his passenger seat
i put on my briefs and sweatpants before walking out barefoot
to hand him ten dollars and have him clean my snow
he takes my money, gifts me a beer
and I recognize his face, six months ago i did his housing papers
he was living in that truck in a walmart parking lot
it’s negative four degrees and before i leave work
i see a client wandering the alleys screaming at voices
she used to hit on me
she likes to flash her tits at cars and fight people in the street
she lives in a makeshift tent in a park
where people are known to traffic, selling tricks and hard drugs
most of these shelters are christian-based
some of them place queers with sex offenders
some just slam the door on queers altogether
there’s a place the social workers call crack-park
with homeless queers, undocumented people, young adults
every few months the cops raid it and tear it down
but even when you think it’s been abandoned
during the floods, after a blizzard
there’s always a new unfamiliar person sleeping there
the plow trucks wake me up at four in the morning
sound travels further the colder it gets
right now it sounds like the train is over my head
and ready to demolish this house
i can’t do this shit anymore, it’s four in the morning
waiting for a client so unhinged that he shoots me in the head
instead, with two hours of sleep in me, i’ll save him again
and at the end of the glass
is a pathetic little snowflake
that doesn’t melt away
no matter how harsh the sickness
no matter how brutal the snowstorm
no matter how cruel the flood
(written in 2019)
your childhood home
that goes back to the 1930s
sunken under the crops that helped build it
like a fairy tale without any magic
raised in hog pins full of shit
warm liquid manure spraying all over the grass
fields of child rape and swollen purple eyes
of messy divorces and suicide attempts
grandpa shooting pregnant cats
castrating pigs and throwing testicles in a silver bucket
grandpa running over your leg with his motorcycle
and telling you to get up you spineless faggot
& a picture of grandpa’s house on fire
held up on the fridge with six magnets
my uncles point their fingers at it and laugh
and chug blue moons and talk shit about being fatherless
was i really born from this land
out of all the alcohol and meth
i can barely remember any of it
except for the abandonment
mom and dad screaming in a bathroom
rolling hills of corn and soybeans
grandma’s endless garden of vegetables
eating blackberries off of trees
chickens running around without heads
the school bus sliding off the road and all of us children
making jokes about weiners and boobies in a ditch
as the fog and the mist and sleet and snow caught up to us
slipping on ice downhill on the way home from school
splitting my lip on the icy sidewalk
licking cracked bloody knuckles because i lost my gloves
feeding myself spaghetti-o’s because I’m not allowed to have dinner for losing my gloves
hiding a yarmulke in my left pocket, squeezing it
birthday dinners, funerals, bris’s, bar mitzvah’s, weddings
barnyards, million-dollar tractors, raided meth houses
forts of snow, sunburns and sun-kissed, tornado sirens
learning a clarinet, joining the youth klezmer quartet
great-grandma’s poetry read from the seventh floor of a retirement home
my uncles wrestling me in their tool and metallica shirts while they were high on meth
petting bengal cats, lung cancer, colon cancer, extermination stories
snow melting in my hands, blood draining out of my father’s nostrils
the blizzard comes through and buries it all as if none of it ever happened
we keep warm with beer and liquor and listen to the windsong’s ballad
the house shaking to the vibration of planes flying over our heads
stories that we’ve lost and have washed up and will never be written
(written in 2015)
she smoked a joint
on the warm fuzzy toilet seat
as a mutated plague rat
gnawed its teeth into the wall
she napped in the bathtub
throttling her eyeballs
as her brother dug a dagger
into a soggy dictionary
and hid an ounce of weed in it
he didn’t know why she had
let a pot of water boil
on the stove for an hour
he didn’t understand why she had
placed a mason jar of spiders
in the freezer next to the ahi tuna steaks
jagged fangs dug deep
into her upper lip
until each cold sore exploded
she handed her brother ten dollars
and turned the stove on again
a sheet of snow
balanced above the windows
the walls cracked and bent
to the gust of the negative thirteen-degree wind
the glowing white was on fire
as he plunged his snow shovel
beneath the ice and rock salt
spitting out gravel and worms
his mother waited
beating an air-horn
while he cleared a path for her
through four feet of snow
when she came into the house she smelled like
1930s farmhouse in iowa sometime in july
with the dead pig shit under her boots
a rotting residue from the dying pregnant feral cats
puking violently in the half-flooded basement
and the kitchen that reeked of
shitty five-day-old chinese take-out food
she made some chai with the boiling water
unpacked a bag of dry food she got from the local pantry
another day of cutting corpses in a slaughterhouse
put to rest she browns some beef in a dirty skillet
her son sucks on his gloves and squeezes hand warmers
his frigid skinny white body collapsed to the floor
barely breathing snow all over his coat and camo jeans
thinking i don’t want to go to work and wash dishes
for a 7.25 minimum-wage at pizza ranch tomorrow
his sister hid the dictionary in a bag of
half empty cat food in her closet
just two grams of weed left in it
the fridge was open when he had woken up
he sucked the seeds out from a dragon fruit
thought about some shit
like more snow outside and a piss test on the counter
and mumbled an exhausted “ma, what the fuck”
“watch your mouth,” mom said.
“fuck you for giving birth to me bitch.”
she didn’t notice
he loaded up her shotgun
took it out from under her bed and into his room
the barrel could barely fit into his mouth
his sister was stoned and playing her
CASIO keyboard making some bad bedroom pop
mom was out chainsmoking letting the hamburger helper simmer
snow drifted through the open backyard door
her mind only on her eight dollar wage,
her son’s piss test, the thousands of dead cows and pigs
and that’s all that she could feel
there was a pop that reminded her of the machine
that crushes a cow’s skull into dust
and when she entered the bedroom
it looked just like the lake of blood outside the meat plant
she took the shotgun back with her to her room
and rolled two shells around like kinetic balls
until the daughter started screaming
like she’s been shut into a meat locker
mom finishes the fireball bottle
the livestock freezes and it seems that
the snow won’t melt anytime soon