Nightmares of Manners and Meat Pie
1.
Royalty are so polite. A Queen requests her husband fetch her sister for a visit. He complies,
but when he first sets eyes on the girl a desire inside him writhes itself into a serpent.
But he can’t just take her in front of her father. That’s simply bad manners.
He smiles, shakes hands, discusses trade and weather, waits
until they’re back safe in his homeland. Ravishes her; there, that’s better.
Yet, for some reason, she seems upset, threatens to spill to gods and sisters.
Well, what an unseemly development! He’d better cut out her tongue instead.
Yet the truth is as relentless as unpleasant. She gets a message to her sister,
the hero who frees her from the hiding place where her monster secreted her away.
2.
A mother has been betrayed by her husband. In this world how doesn’t matter.
She can never return to what once were going to be their shared and endless pleasures.
When his benevolence and wisdom were as apparent as his smile’s dimple.
Now all that remains is to ruin that face with suffering.
Because his appetite for sin is relentless, she will poison him with innocence.
Because he has raped his own nobility, she plans to castrate his name.
But before she shreds the body of her son to bake into the pastry she’ll feed his father,
before she watches him eat while drinking the sweetest mountain wine,
she calls the boy and kneels down to meet him, arms opened wide as all he’s ever known.
Her smile the same as every other time.
Bio:
Michael Collins’ poems have received Pushcart Prize nominations and appeared in more than 40 journals and magazines, including Grist, Kenning Journal, Pank, and Smartish Pace. His first chapbook, How to Sing when People Cut off your Head and Leave it Floating in the Water, won the Exact Change Press Chapbook Contest in 2014. A full-length collection, Psalmandala, was published later that year. Another chapbook, Harbor Mandala, is forthcoming in July of 2015. Visit http://www.notthatmichaelcollins.com/ for more.