Ibis

Luigi Sposato

 

First, you walk barefoot on salted snow until the cardiac
muscle, stuffed behind the lips of fat chambering
your own heart, beats you senseless. Only when your syllables
are slurred can we speak to the bump-bump rumbles
of your gut, shining with slick grease dripping from the overhang.

Now, you’ve grafted new mouths to your palms so you can
feed beside the ibis, gnawing at its own feathers with black eyes
fixated on the abyss—the ibis—another wading form
that promises silence, that promises words stitched in skin
to close a billion holes that rose from a thousand far-off colts.

You can taste the feathers; you see them. Black feathers
adorning the hooves clattering on metal plates against the pokeweed.
You suckle at the juice the sable stallion churns for you. Somewhere,
the pokeweed. Elsewhere, the skull. But here. Here. Black wine.
Featherless ibis—you—where have you spoken the difficult syllables?