The drought is over. There was a blackout and a rumble, the thunderstomached god sucking his misplaced angel off of the playground. The sticky fingers and bobbled pigtails disappear from the teeter totter and the balance is restored. The fields go green overnight, like a bone snapped.
Hound Dog comes on beneath static and rain, rising like a new born zombie, I am decoding nothing except the pins and needles in my chest. Hearts are like dogs sometimes, they know a ghost when they see one. And this is the song that makes the spirits under my bed come out and dance with me. This is the one that makes the bogeyman get electric all night long.
I pressed my nose against the glass at the snake exhibit, and wiped the green snot from my red nose with my blue sweater. I wished I could take you home with me. Slide you into the cubbie holes of bullies, and let them feel the venom like I feel the venom. All my sweaters are black now. That was not a choice, that was a prophecy spoken by you alone. The red eyed, the ancient skinned, and colder than your swimming pool in half naked january.
We are moving fast, and ignoring the signs. Some of them use letters, mostly though just roadkill. We are mixing the taste of squirrel blood and skidding tires into truth or dare at sleepaway camp, sneaked out and hopped up, and smacking this broken flashlight into a spruce tree. The mist carries the smell of deer carcass and marsh flesh, into your socks, between your toes, curling around your sprained ankles like a one eyed cat. Beckoning bad luck. A scream from the woods cuts the sky open. We all hear it. We put our tongues out for the rain.
The drought is over. The geek down the street slipped and busted his asthmatic lungs at the edge of the lake, that's the end of the story, ok? Ok. The drought is over, we wake to dew on our eyelashes, and the roses outside the town asylum yellow instead of brown. The grass is green now, the dryads are drinking wine with their sisters, the woodland fairies are alive and tearing their struggling food to pieces, green wrigglers and powdery moth flesh between their pink jaws. Three weeks of rain and for once in neighborhood history everybody kept their tongues in their mouths.
He just slipped. We got our sacrifice, we aren't savages like our fathers, but we got our sacrifice, even if we didn't ask for it. We throw the evidence into the river, and hope for a good summer.
