The Undertaker's Jowls by LanternGothique, literature
Literature
The Undertaker's Jowls
The feral dogs crossed through the cemetery
of sheets my mother draped in the backyard,
their spectral feet faintly treading above
the catacombs of regret.
At night
I would lie beneath the windows
and wait for their silhouettes to pass
over my aching limbs.
Their guttural howls echoed
within my breathless throat.
Their moans sounded like my father's chest
before he swallowed kerosene
and ignited the matchbook mouth of my mother.
We set his body behind the rotting shed,
and bent the withered remains of sunflowers
over his desiccated husk.
On the seventh day
his tombstone was brown and stiff
and the dogs had licked his eye s
i.
We awoke inside a snowstorm,
The moisture locked within our voids
And weighing us down like heavy sobs
As we exhumed the rigid doe body
From beneath the grave of headlights
And placed it within the sepulchral woods.
We are one less night of sleep
With blood under our heels
And the distant sound of bones cracking
In each other's voices.
ii.
I am painting murals on
The marred hide of my body,
Seeking to become an existence
You once knew,
To kiss morning behind the dusk
Of your eyelids and imprint this world
On the tomb of your flesh
Before spring rain can wash spectrums
Down the unspoken hymns of our thighs,
Wavering
The insects crawl down her throat
To the hollow of her stomach,
Their capsule bodies breaking within her,
And she knows the echo of their death
Will reverberate through her veins
Like a discordant weathervane.
His hands are made of poetry
That each night softly mold themselves,
Yearning to fit into the white wave
Of her pelvis like the wash of ocean.
The words rise against his body
Like the arch of her stomach,
Absent of phrases he is too
Wary to write on the insides
Of her cheeks for he knows
The weight of words.
As each day he peels paper
From his vocal chords and eyes,
Desperate to touch the reality
Nestled somewhere in the
Dense forest of his ribcage.
But his hands bleed ink
Along her neck and face
Like black bruises of poverty
And he is helpless
To leave any part of her
Sincere and unmarred.
He does not want these limbs