Luther Hughes

From the Lynched

Dear Blood,              There is no god this angle. 
I finger the spray of maggots. It is tiresome
decaying inward to dust. Unblooming an angel
from the core, I grit my wings until a sear flares

the porous bones. O Blood! Can you see where I storm? 
It is dark. There are constellations: bruised, feral.
Here, my body, I tell the night. Here is how you time
a withering animal: watch the scaled-skin 

bleed the heart hollow. Watch the blonding leaf
at the crown of tree bow when winds sink
the eyes to skull. This is not false. This is not false.
My dead shrieks from the toughest branch,

morphs the black mouth and the mouth
flees the face as a moth. 

Riding with Death

He was the last stallion
I rode,
dick-hungry: not yet
soot: my mouth
vanished
behind the darkness—a pure
mammal, his bones unskinned
and I, spooled
of rubies, opened like a zipper
stuck
on its threads, seams clotting
before stripped.
My face morphed
into one eye
when the horse’s hind
legs spoke
and I spoke and my thighs gripped
the homely animal’s ribcage,
each rib-bone
disappearing.
But understand this: I loved him,
madly, meat seething romance,
clicked, dipped
into the cold kiss of his thinness,
his wilderness
of maggots and waxwing moths gnawed
the skull-sockets until static.
It was his naked that haunted—
those skillet hips would swallow
my young suckling, jaw widen. 
                           Removed.
Still: if you look at him 
now: 
flat spine, trotting on four,
maneless,
who’d think Grim Reaper? Satin cloak? Stainless
scythe?
O poor Death, poor savage beast, you thought
my end would birth here, our bodies wrestling
to become one nature. 
You see, my love, I’m what the ancestors
engraved into the midnight indigo.
Infinite and godly:
when you arrived
at my door, I whipped you
in the ass
and the ass bowed in my name
like a sunset.