Transmogrifying Honey Battered

Muddily the morning crept.

Though rain often causes fowl lungs 

to top off with droplets, drowning so many 

of the raised-head dummies—

Chucky the chicken, rooster to some,

cocked his head, juked or jived

at a too-inopportune time

and startled a sting from the resting 

transmogrifying bee.

 

This was how Janet skipped 

into the scene upon waking:

the broken syringe, dangling

microscopic bits of bee belly-flesh, 

plugging the swell of purple—the sundered 

venom sac pulsing in toxins like an IV—

which caused Chucky’s clunky heart

too much issue with tissue constriction.

 

Janet wept for her perished pet,

mourned the morning, played 

devastated Dr. Frankenstein with two 9-volts

through lunchtime. Her cries even survived

as eggs and flour and honey and paprika

were whisked together for a batter

that could staunch any tears.

That would stop her tears.

 

No crying at dinner, Janet. Enough already.

What will you do on the day of reckoning, when disaster comes from afar?

Woe to those who make unjust laws, to those who issue oppressive decrees, to deprive the poor of their rights and withhold justice from the oppressed of my people, making widows their prey and robbing the fatherless.

-Isaiah 10

 

I hope Mitch McConnell dies

of natural causes when his time 

 

comes. And it will come, and soon—

yet the stain of his sonic boom,

 

his pattern of non-work so emphatic

is the shade of a tree unplanted. 

 

If society grows when old men plant 

trees whose cool shadow will never land

 

on their hands, where are we now, Mitch?

We’re pitching heaters at the kid 

 

in the batter’s box full of doubts

whose dad got his three strikes and is out 

 

of the picture. While he’s at bat 

they stole the wallet from his backpack

 

and someone burned down his house

for good measure. Is that where we are now?

_____________

Zebulon Huset is a teacher, writer and photographer. He won the Gulf Stream 2020 Summer Poetry Contest and his writing has appeared in Best New Poets, Texas Review, North American Review, Meridian, The Southern Review, Fence and many others. He publishes the prompt blog Notebooking Daily, and edits the journals Coastal Shelf and Sparked.