Poetry: Machu Picchu By Damon Hubbs
Machu Picchu
My father,
drunk inside his own private gallery.
Belly down
with the heart of a dog.
His life
is a two item list. Me —I’ll go birding
in Machu
Picchu, tour the churches, look for a party
gone
wrong.
I can
still smell the carnations
with my
wax-free ear for romanticism. After all,
the
physicians weren’t Swiss.
Poor
mother. No oblivion; or salvation. Her leg like the stub
of a
credit card receipt; the disease a Roman mob.
And where
are the ladies now.
Father
only hears one perfect song.
Peru has
1,897 confirmed species. 120 are endemic.
That last
one, Martha? Linda?
—she was
down to fuck
but he
said to hell
with that,
and picked the weeds between the pavers
one by
one. There are no tidy conclusions.
No
oblivion; or salvation.
I’ve run
out of good will.
Mornings
in Mexico
with D.H.
Lawrence, the parrots and their perro perr-rro—
sun-breasted
creatures with wings
like
two-decks of oars.
I copy
grief into a little book.
It’s never
the same after that.
The call
to action is somewhere else.
Friends
come and go. The Old Masters can’t sleep at night.
Down and
back
the sun
does its thing.
Damon
Hubbs's work has
appeared in Hobart, Apocalypse Confidential, Farewell
Transmission, Bruiser Magazine, The Gorko Gazette, Horror Sleaze
Trash, and elsewhere. He is the author of the poetry collections Nighttime
Logic and Venus at the Arms Fair. He is a poetry
editor at Blood+Honey.