These torn-ear mat-haired cats, they hang around for milk and rats and the small field mice that run ragged among the hooves toward the holes in the poorly plastered corners where they can get away. I have seen these female cats run across cow backs to get away from the hired men. Then the toms breed the ones unlucky enough to get outside, all snarl and puffed fur and neck-biting yowl, they get into the house through the wall-holes, and those poor kittens, born under the floorboards in my room. I am the only one small enough to reach a hand into the dark and haul them out, put them into the shoebox and carry them out to the barn to join the rest to live or die.

I have seen cats die in many ways: under a tractor tire, drowned in cowshit, run through the manure spreader, snapped up by dogs, smacked flat in the road, sunk in hay, mewing piteously. I’ve seen worse than that, their tails tied together and thrown over the clothesline and scrowling their cries until I put on my dad’s welding gloves and got them down.

Dork washes his hands in the scum-covered water of the bathtub water tank and flips some of the rot at me. I duck, but I can’t mess with him. He’s at least sixteen and I am not, but I know he’s coming after me someday. I can see it in his eyes. The gray one nuzzles against me, just like a housecat. I shoo it away. I watch Dork to see what happens next, I watch his wet hands on the ratty towel. I watch Stony file the spikes in his boot.

Late November and no snow.
The Krag has a clip in it, leans
Against the barbed-wire sunk deep
Inside the wood.

Randall sits on the ridge drinking
coffee and wishing, the hapless fuck.
No whitetail should come within miles
but he finds a dumb one.

He raises the Krag and dumps coffee
down his Carharted thigh, which
he ignores, and lets the trigger go
as he breathes softly.

Randall wishes he could become
the bullet, the perfect spiral
losing itself as it sails toward flesh
punches and tears

into the heart muscle, watches the deer
bound once and fall before the report
has sounded. Randall jumps up and raises
his hands in triumphal salute,

takes a step forward and like torn air 
the canvas pants give way before the wire;
that sharp star and his flesh become one.
Pain makes it all clear.

Beyond the pale, the deer bleeds dry.

–The Gospel of Bartholomew

He held her trembling head in his hands like a rotten melon, trying his best to accept those tremors for himself. He wanted to help her along, through this thing, but couldn’t speak yet. A full moon of terror and swell, her brown eyes lost in her pasty flesh, a grotesque masque of the face whose lines he had traced with his tongue and lips—it burdened him to look at her, but he forced himself to, because that’s what love was for him—the immediacy of facing this other person and what they brought with them, the sad facts of their life and their unequal happinesses, and knowing they would do the same for you, no matter what the cost, no matter the distance. And for Frank and Shirlee, the cost had been great–children, health, their marriage–and the return non-existent. Yet twenty years after their divorce, he remained at her side. She called; he came.

Shirlee had been with him during years he could no longer remember except to know they had passed, when he noticed his guts sagging under his flesh, the penis disappeared into a rat of hair between his legs, the gray in her temples spreading like sea-spray on the blackness of her head. She could still whisper in his ear, and poked him when she wanted him to bend forward so he could hear her breathily rattle her words into his ear.

Now. Frank.

No.

I’m tired, Frank

Go to sleep then.

Read to me, Frank.

He checked her intravenous fluids, filled the hypodermic, tears blooming, and read:

And he led them to a place called Cherubim, that is, the place of truth. And he beckoned to the angels of the West. And the earth was rolled up like a papyrus, and the abyss was exposed to their eyes. When the apostles saw it, they fell on their faces. But Jesus said to them: “Did I not say to you it was not good for you to see the abyss?” And he again beckoned to the angels, and the abyss was covered up.

Frank drew her limp body into his arms and tears came, and he cursed God. Over and over, he promised things he had no power over, cursed, and over and over again cursed. When he had purged, when her cooling body forced his fear of what he had done to surface, his only consoling thought was that tender thing he had learned in Sunday School, so long ago, that when a person died, when Shirlee died from the chemical he’d injected to force the issue—God’s temple, God’s body, after all—of all the hearts in the world and all the cherubim and seraphim and doctors and nurses and police who would soon pass judgement, God’s heart was the first to break.

Breaking it Down

Pine

https://oneartpoetry.com/2025/07/22/pine-by-rusty-barnes/

I scraped the sap from a pine
over and over again until
it turned to resin in my hand,
impossible to wash away.

I used it to get a better grip
on my baseball bat, something
to allay the pain in my palms
when I twisted my wrists.

I used it to close the shallow
cuts on my left wrist before I
knew that what I had done
was to traffic in suicide.

Only bright days ahead,
I thought. Sunshine and lollys.

Kory hears the door slam behind her, and loses a shoe in her haste to get to the truck, always unlocked when his .30-30 isn’t in the gun-rack. She flips down the sun visor, the keys drop in her lap, and she can hear Joe grunting his way down the driveway, cursing his tender bare feet on the sharp gravel. She thinks, for such a tough guy, he ought to have tougher soles.

Turning the key in the ignition, smoothly negotiating clutch and gas and ball-shifter, she hears him yell something, feels the patter of small stones against the rear window and truck bed. The Ford careens backward, fishtails slightly, and then she’s out the long driveway, past the barn. Free. On her way. She can feel the side of her head, hot and pulsing, where Joe hit her. After she had broken the flashlight against his hard skull. Michael would protect her, the nagging feelings tells her, but she was so unused to the idea that it just floored her to think of it.

She lights a cigarette from Joe’s pack of cigarettes and considers her options. Mom’s is out, as it’s the first place he will go when he wangles a borrowed car. Patricia’s is out too, as that’s the second place he’ll go. She needs to drive a little farther than he will guess, so she heads to her boyfriend’s place, Coryland, past the Noble farm, right, then she can hit the logging road halfway up and cross over behind the big field and onto Judson Hill Road. It’s only 8 ‘o’ clock, so she won’t be noticed.

Joe would never expect her at Michael’s, she thinks, as Michael is skinny and asthmatic, a yoga geek and a flatlander, someone whose ass Joe could kick with a minimum of effort, as opposed to her mother or Patricia, neither of whom Joe could safely hit or threaten. At the quick of something now, she gathers herself with a small shrug. She wonders blindly at all the choices in front of her, and chooses one. What anybody else would do. And Joe doesn’t know who Michael is, only that she has a BOYFRIEND, and so he won’t suspect, she hopes. Pushes buttons on the radio until she find some old country, soothing plaintive sounds that mean nothing to the situation, what she’s in for now. Her face shifts from throb to ache. Michael will hit back. He has to in order to be the man she thinks he is, skinny, but twisted muscle about the abdomen, scarred additionally by some childhood trauma. She didn’t know if he could help, but the drive will tell. She’s tempted just to keep on trying. Granny always told her that things looked greener on the other side and all those seasoned sayings, but the tumult in her gut tells her otherwise.

She hears the truck’s cell phone buzz, picks it up without thinking. “Don’t think this is the end of it, K.” She hangs up without answering, takes the curve by the Campbell place too fast, slides off the road and into the ditch, thumps her head against the driver’s side window, but not hard enough for the airbags to deploy. She’s dazed, but nothing seems to be damaged, so she starts the truck again and pulls out. She can see kids on their front porch lighting their pumpkins or something, the place is a blaze of yellow light, and one of them points toward her, and another one goes inside.

Kory knows she needs to get on the logging road, so she guns it. Near the hedgerow now and within a mile of Michael’s place, she runs the truck into a copse of poplar scrub, snapping saplings and scraping brush all along the sides. She cuts the engine and lights. It’s a ten minute walk now to Michael’s place, and even if Joe thinks to drive by, he won’t see the truck, and will continue on roaming the hills and checking with every friend she’s ever had, every family member she’s ever mentioned. Or maybe he’s found out who Michael is already.

If she knows Joe, he’ll report her as missing, and within an hour the VFD and the local Boy Scouts will be looking, and she won’t stand a chance of getting away. She sees them canvassing the hill in their lines ten feet apart, poking with their sticks through the oats, traveling down the neat rows of corn near the field she’s left the truck in. Her breath comes more quickly now as she realizes the gravity of what she’s done wrong: left her husband, not hit back, run away to the person least able to help.

Hill:

Michael’s house is dark except for the light in the bedroom, where he keeps the PC. He works as a programmer of some kind, where they have fucked in their awkward way, where she has found some measure of herself and her self-respect in the last few years with Joe.

Michael meets her at the door in his boxers, his skinny chicken legs dark with hair, looking puzzled. She holds him and hugs him hard and imagines he must smell her fear-sweat.

“It’s Joe. He knows about us. But not that it’s you, I mean.”

“Jesus, K.” Michael steps away from her, hugs himself across the biceps as if he’s cold.

“He’ll never come here. Really.” Kory wants to believe it.

Michael shuts the door, picks up an aluminum baseball bat from his living room closet, sits on the couch with it, twisting the handle in his hands. In the cool night air Kory hears the sound of an engine, not far away, smoothly running through the gears on a straight stretch, and she trembles.

Hollow:

Joe steps back into the house, cursing his feet, but steps from his safe room. He spins the dial quickly and grabs the first pistol in the small rack, a .45 Kimber he bought with his last Army paycheck a year or so back. The grip is a little greasy; he hasn’t put more than a hundred rounds through it. He inserts a clip and stuffs the gun into his pants behind the belt. She knows not to hit up any relatives. No friends. That Patricia slut, maybe. Fuck this. Find the truck. Find her. He closes the door behind him, hops the fence and heads to the neighbors.

“Jimmy. Need to borrow your truck,” Joe says. Jimmy sighs from under his wife’s car, slides out the dolly and sits upright.

“Brother, you need to settle down before you do stupid shit.” Jimmy is solid with Joe, always has been. He looks worried now.

“Settle my ass. Kory tried to coldcock me and then took off in my fucking truck. I’m done.”

Jimmy sighs and puts down the wrench. “You been done forty times with this chick. I’m sure she appreciates the fact that you always come back, but I’m a little tired of running interference for you.”

“I didn’t ask you.” Joe drills his hands deep into his pockets. “You don’t know how she is, fucking changing her mind every other day. She don’t know what she wants. And no sex? I mean, what the fuck?”

“You will ask me again,” Jimmy says, sighing.

“Bullshit. You been through this forty times with me? Let’s see how a guy’s best friend ought to do for him. You ought to be with me forty-one and forty-two and forty fucking ever.” Joe tries to light a cigarette but drops it as soon as it ignites.

“Get the divorce already.” Jimmy hands Joe the keys and rolls back under his wife’s car. “Just don’t kill her.”

Hill:

The dark horizon beckons Michael. Fucking hell. Every truck could be Joe or Joe and his friends or the cops or fucking whoever. He plucks at the back of his head, already soaked with fear-sweat. Kory rubs his back but it seems to be having the opposite effect of what she intends.

“He’ll probably go to Jimmy’s or somewhere and drink it off.” Kory massages his shoulders hard. He feels her small tense breasts against his back, heaving slightly in time with her heart, he imagines. She’s come to him in a lacy pair of panties and an oversize shirt that serves as a nightdress. Kory is a woman who never leaves without her red lipstick and a whitened face and neck. He squeezes the handle of the bat.

“He’s going to find you here.” Michael cracks his fingers each a tiny shot in the quiet. “Tell me again why the fuck you came here?”

“Where else could I go?” Kory begins to cry great heaving snotty snobs. “I hit him. He’s not going to stop until he finds me. You’re the one who’s supposed to protect me now.”

“Oh fine.” Michael’s hand goes to the back of his head again, and Kory can see he’s not up for any of this.

“Ok. Fuck you. I fucked you, you fucked me, it was supposed to not be complicated.” Kory wipes her nose on her shirt. “Do you have a gun at least?”

“You’re kidding, right?” Michael stares at her then drops his gaze, slowly shaking his head.

“What kind of a guy lives here and doesn’t have a gun?” Kory says. She is slowly composing herself. Michael can see the machinery begin again behind her eyes.

“I’ve got a .22. For the raccoons.” Michael says. “I don’t even know if it’s loaded. It’s by the kitchen door.

“Jesus Christmas,” Kory says. In the kitchen a single-shot .22 is by the door along with the broom and mop, six rounds in an ashtray by the sink. She throws the bolt and catapults a tiny shell across the kitchen. Searching furiously, she finds the round under the refrigerator coil among the dust bunnies and spilled food. She joins Michael by the front door. “He’s borrowed a truck by now,” she thinks out loud.

Her cell phone rings. Kory is simply nodding at whatever Jimmy is saying. Her eyes are tearing again, and she holds the phone under her ear and on her shoulder and cocks the .22, as soon as Jimmy hangs up.

“He’s coming now,” Kory says. “Jimmy says we have maybe ten minutes.”

Michael throws the bat down. “Fuck this and fuck you,” he yells. Walks in the kitchen. “Where the fuck are my car keys?”

“How should I know where you put your fucking keys?” Kory adjusts her butt on the easy chair so that Michael can’t see she’s sitting on the keys.

It’s coming to her, the plan that will make it all right, All right. Granny had told her not to suffer the man who wouldn’t commit. Along with the man that would cheat or beat. Granny said watch the man put on his shoes. If he put on the left one first, you all right. And cackled. Kory had a trifecta. Commit, cheat, beat. Just two different men. Neither of who could bring her off the way she wanted, let alone be what she needed

“You worthless sack of shit.” Kory points the .22 at Michael and before she can think the report of the gun brings her back. The heavy thump. Michael’s sprouted a third blue eye, all of them open now and wondering why she had done it. A thin line of blood breaks from his third eye.

She leaves Michael lay there and goes out the side door into the garage for the lawnmower gasoline. She douses the living room and the kitchen before running out. She loves that sharp smell. Tosses the match, watches the flames rise. Loads the .22. Watches the propane tank get hotter.

Joe pulls up beside her with the roar of Jimmy’s truck, much more powerful than his own. “Jesus, Kory. What did you do? Are there people in there?”

Joe runs to the porch and door to see if he can get in. When he can’t he pulls the Kimber from his pants and points it at her. “He’s in there? Your boyfriend? Jesus” All the realizations gather in his face at once. The Kimber drops to his side. Kory shoots him in the shoulder. He drops the gun. She reloads and shoots him in the throat-apple. Both hands go to his neck.

“You will miss me when I burn,” he gargles, as the propane tank explodes into a halo of flame. She shoots Joe again and again, chambering each shell gently and firmly to the point where she can’t tell what’s him and what’s howl.

Hollow:

She’s waiting in the truck, watching the fire department and ambulances in her rear view. Kicks the truck into reverse and rides it all the way down the road with her lights off. Her first thought was a new ride. She knew a guy who knew a guy. She knew a lot of guys, when it came down to it. Punched the radio buttons again. George Fucking Jones. She let the Possum’s drawl guide her all the way to the state line. George Jones, yes. That man could fucking sing.

Dear So & So: 

After Frank O'Hara

I reach out to you in a poem
because I can't stand on principle

anymore. I wanted you and I want
you and yeah. You get the point.

35 years ago you tried to get me
to join your commune in NC. It's

awesome, you said, your blue-dyed 
and brindled hair wandering in loose

strands like dandelion clocks. I nicked
a free copy of Spare Change News. 

I had poems in it, you may recall
and the lumpy suet of my intentions

hay-wired then. You giggled and spoke
in Latin--te amo--and I brushed you

away then feeling invincible. Years after
now I still feel your soft hand on

the nape of my neck. I wonder what
happened next. I'll have to dream it true.

War Whips it Out in Public

In the night a war steps in the room,
a toadying lickspittle war with bad teeth,

a savior complex and spindly reddish hair.
In the distance a mosque looms big as the sky.

The war decides to bomb the shit out
of it and the phrase collateral damage

comes out and vexes. The tone is off,
war is a fucking crook, everyone

knows it as soon as it steps in the room
all Visigoth and thunderhead,

the poor mosque doesn't know what
to do and shits itself in a panic shedding

dome and minarets and brick and glass
all over the grounds. But war doesn't

care it just smithereens the walls down
and calls it fighting for love & peace.

Orwell smirks in his grave and rolls over,
presents his ass for war to kiss but old 

war groans out another bomb in Yemen
and children incinerate in the maelstrom.

What does war want anyway? More war!
What do we want? Nobody can agree!

War goes on just fucking us over,
like so many lice in the infested,

over and over and over again: Yemen
Iraq Afghanistan just off the top.

When war walks into the room and grabs
its crotch no one knows what to do,

we all sit and stare like idiots as it
makes us talk dumb and slicks its hair

back with a wet comb and sneers.

At the Edge of the Chopping

Today at 9:45 AM my brother agreed to butcher a turkey for Sunday dinner. As the younger brother it was my duty to witness as it was a good experience for a young man. I was 13. My brother’s friend Stuart offered to hold the bird down while my brother axed it by the neck. Stuart held the bird by its wings as it attempted to go anywhere else, gouging Stuart’s hand with its claws. Jesus, Stuart said. He held the bird hard, stretched its neck against the pine trees root as my brother took over and did what was necessary. The bird flopped and skittered, shedding blood at every move. It became my task to rid it of feathers before its muscles solidified. I did it and hated it and did and hated it, especially the pinfeathers. My brother and Stuart agreed the axe should have been sharper. I washed my hands in bleach.

after Frank Stanford

The rock and creak of the oar-locks,
water and the sunlight converging
at a grit-dark horizon over the lake,
the smell of someone grilling,

the scent of cheap propane
combined with suntan lotion,
the deep scent of your sex
following me as I prepare to dive in.

And dream. When the slight current
hits, the rowboat pitches and you
grab the oars, nearly thumping
me with one. You laugh.

Someday you will say this
is a false memory. It’s not.

Journal 8/1/22

always after Paul Blackburn

The evening weather is mild, 80 degrees. No need to
bust open the AC unit.

I'm remembering warm summer nights
      shooting ants from my front porch with
          my Red Ryder BB gun. All those ants I shot
               gathered their souls from the sun and I

gather my soul unto you, Lord of all fathers,
does life prickle your eternal conscience?

The ants are in the house now despite all
    efforts, an orderly line carrying crumbs
          from our kitchen, as best they can avoid
               

our bundle of tense felines. The birds

in the front yard: grackle and thrush, martin
and sparrow. Lift their thoughts on high!

Jesus came to me tonight as an ant, all still-foot and denial.
     "Now is not the time to question, toss your logic 
          aside and believe in me" he says as a runnel of piss
               flows down my leg. If I can't contain myself in

your presence Lord, the afterlife you promise,
fluffy clouds and golden gates, I despair of it all.

I feel as if I could write a poem,
about all the different places

men can do it. Now in Paris,
gaily-painted red urinals

along the Seine right out
in the open. Just straighten up

and let fly I guess. As if
men can't control them-

selves better than women.
Paul Blackburn wrote 'Peeing

All Over the Peninsula'
and William Matthews wrote

'Pissing Off the Back of the Boat
into the Nivernais Canal.'

I feel as if I should dignify
my pissing with my own poem,

but the truth is I've never
pissed anywhere exciting,

unless it's been off the tailgate
of a slow-moving truck,

or fifty yards behind a tree
so as not to ruin the stand

with my scent or in an alley
behind a strip club in the Combat

Zone once in the freezing cold AM,
but those aren't exotic locales.

I'm unembarrassed to admit them
but once there was this woman

who held me in her hand while
I did it in a bathroom; I think

she is worth a poem but I'll think
hard and long before I write it.

https://www.blackcoffeereview.com/fall-2019-1/pissing-in-public-urinals-by-rusty-barnes

I want to fuck you lonesome.
I want to teethe rocks and spit gravel.
I want to suffuse you with irony.
I want the world to open with your clubfoot.
I want the apple tree hanging with used condoms.
I want a spare bedroom when we argue.
I want to gird my lines with peristalsis.
I want a cheap hardback volume of Frost.
The sting of the lily pad/the softness of the bee.
Like Kinnell's Fergus coming to the ground of his making.
The plain breath spent on this: the Blackburn journal.
Odin One-Eye. Robert Creeley. Jim Harrison: 
Odd fellows I've come to love especially when I bleed.
I want to find a street corner named Marylebone
--and roost there, toothless.
I want to seize your gentle ear with my lips and tongue. 
What poetry strives for best is living language aptly said.

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