Slip
If my hand misses,
I cut something
other than throat.
Maybe I graze
the animal’s neck
or slice to bone.
Maybe the knife
comes back on me.
All these years
as death’s fellow,
my cuts loosening
the earth’s brutes
from the flesh
that roots them.
I tire of this tool’s
rough handle, its
steel that blood
alone can warm.
It never asked
for my palm,
my psalm, my
sworn devotion—
not to the lives
I’ve made but to
the ones I’ve made
slip away.
*
Dana Henry Martin’s work has appeared in The Adroit Journal, Barrow Street, Chiron Review, FRiGG, Muzzle, New Letters, Willow Springs, and other journals. Martin’s chapbooks include No Sea Here (Moon in the Rye Press, forthcoming), Toward What Is Awful (YesYes Books), In the Space Where I Was (Hyacinth Girl Press), and The Spare Room (Blood Pudding Press).
Great, Dana! Thank you,
Nan