day THIRTY ONE

Last Light at the Biograph

The streets will splay,
a monkey’s paw of perdition,
black fingers curling to claw
the ancient fissures of the palm.
Without map or memory,
each road will braid a common scenery.
The signs will mean nothing.

Girls in bathing suits will press
hands to the observation window,
a mushroom cloud of white
billowing in their wake,
bleached cotton draped over scarecrows,
the thorny men in supplication
to the body behind the glass.

We will eat the fingers first,
sacrificing the hands
before the delicacy of tongues,
the most abstract of numbers
finding measure in teeth.

“Do you chew?”
will be the tenor of the thin and famous.
Bleached and horned skulls,
carved clean by jungle ants,
will grin under a bloody moon.

We will eat the ants.
We will eat the roaches.
We will eat the fleas.
We will eat the sand.
We will eat the ashes.
We will eat the air.

The pyres will be like Christmas trees
when at long last the final mourners pass
and in the body of Dillinger we trust.

--Larry Duncan

Bio: Larry Duncan currently lives in Redondo Beach, CA. His poetry has appeared in Juked, the Mas Tequila Review, Emerge Literary Journal and the Free State Review. He is the author of two chapbooks, Crossroads of Stars and White Lightning and Drunk on Ophelia. To learn more about Larry and his writing, visit at http://larrydunc.wix.com/larry-duncan.