#Bucky can’t fuck with a flying rodent

[cherry-pop-elf]

My Loki Main Ass:

“YOUR GOD IS SUFFERING!!!!”

Me, playing the Punisher: *minding my own business*

Enemy Winter Soldier: Armed and Dangerous! Again!

Me:

Winter Soldier, getting closer: Again! AGAIN! AGAIN!! AG—

Me:

[nostroviapress]

"Passion is a dirty thumbnail peeling into the ripe flesh of a plum: it is tainted with human and is sometimes a process of revealing layers of something that would grow anyway. Passion is the painter at rest, daydreaming of days to come. Passion is the new moon but the expectation that in two weeks it will be luminous once again. Passion should come at no price: it should be free."

Samuel J. Fox is a bisexual poet living in BFE, North Carolina. He will blur your social norms/he will slur your binaries into nonsense. He has lyric essays appearing in Muse/A Journal, (b)OINK, and The Avenue; he has poems appearing in (b)OINK, Luna Luna Magazine, and Maudlin House. He is also a guitarist/vocalist with Fox & the Vineyards. You can find him on Twitter / Facebook.

THE LITTLE LORD OF VERMIN

**I. **Scabs and fleas. The wildling dreams of magic that can turn him into a fox. He plays with rodents behind the house that sits on a small hill. An angel guards a fountain empty of robins. In the house is a drunkard and man who cannot believe in magic or love. That is how most myths begin: whether in magic or in love. The man sleeps most days, works most nights. His boy, a darkling-eyed dreamer, names all the creatures in the grove. Twin rabbits: spit and spackle. A murder of ravens: night-shed, claw-spark, thresher. The family of deer: purity and her doe little mercy. Then there is the fox: the boy calls the vixen his mother’s name.

II.

The trees lean in to gossip about how the boy is growing. He has not yet learned to ignore the world and see it as the circus he will have to enter. He plays in the riverbed searching for emeralds. He finds them engraved in the minnows’ shallow armor.

III.

The drunk man loses everything one day; at least, everything he would care to lose. His job; money to keep liquor and the lights running; he breaks the television, the same he tuned into God every evening, falling into an exodus of dreams while the televangelist screams. He even loses his shadow: it does not wish to follow him anymore. He returns home to find the boy asleep, a small wren singing in his throat.

IV.

Have you figured out yet where this is going? Have you reconsidered reading? There is no such thing as happy endings. Everyone likes to be lied to – pretend such things, like magic, like miracles, exist – but I don’t prefer to lie. I can believe in miracles the same way I can believe in death: only when it occurs.

V.

The father begins drinking during the day. The boy begins asking birds how to fly. The boy realizes his father has a badger lodged in his gut. The father realizes his boy has no grip on reality. The father gets angry and hits the boy in his steeple white mouth. The boy runs out of the house, crimson and crying. The boy wishes his father was dead: just like how he has no mother because of death. The birds wish they could teach him to flee.

VI.

A vixen will take in a cub from any liter because she, though fierce, is not cruel. She washes the boys knuckles chapped from his father’s blows. She shines them like they were shields. The boy asks her name. When she tells him, he hears the ghost of a voice, the echo of his mother.

VII.

Would you believe me if I told you that birds learn to fly the same way we learn to speak? We watch, we listen, we learn, we fail, and then we, one day while muttering into the future, discover how our lips move over our own breath.

VIII.

The father grows old. He calls his son a rat. One day the father decides to show his son that pain is the only thing that can make a man become real. He takes a cigarette and burns a hole in his son’s wrist. The son doesn’t cry. He doesn’t scream. He doesn’t blink; and the father falls asleep to the season and sounds of gnashing teeth.

IX.

The father dies several years later. He dies of a lack of dreams and magic (or by falling into the liquor cabinet and drowning). The boy is old enough by then to leave. The boy takes the mother vixen’s body, the one he found curled under their tree with an exit wound in her heart. He cuts off her paw. He preserves it. He wears it like a new heart. He wears it so the world can’t take his magic without seeing it first.

X.

What if I told you I lied about everything? What if I told you there was no father? No empty space where shadow should be? No liquor cabinet, no grove, no lack of dreams? However, there was a boy. The boy was me.

THE KID

I was born: made of gunpowder and exit wounds. Didn’t know my daddy much save what he left behind: knuckle-marks stained on walls day old cologne still stuck in halls beard trimmings clogged in his sink footprints fading down a sidewalk in the snow and an old shirt I swore I’d never grow into.

Doctor said momma drowned in her sleep, called it tuberculosis. I left the next day; stumbled away from that rotten apple that was only good for holding worms anymore. I headed west past the frontier country into my own manifest destiny, seeking God. But God don’t say much these days, at least not to boys like me.

The devil’s greatest stunt isn’t that he tricks you into thinking he don’t exist: it’s that he does and he’ll shake your hand firm like a friend. I learned that your enemies stab you in the back like cowards, but that your friends look you in the eye as they stab you in the heart. I still got a pitch fork in my spine where I should have grown a living from.

I started thieving, robbing, laid down with women not old enough to know weddings but not young enough to be stupid. I joined a militia: I learned to shoot a pistol in the dark and hit the cherry of a cigarette from thirty yards. My finger was brave but I don’t ever think I learned what a man is.

The soldiers . . . they called me a kid. Still eighteen, they didn’t know I’d be a legend at twenty-one. I showed them. Sometimes you got to switch opinions even if that means you betray a man: at least I had the decency to look him in the eyes when I done it.

I became the youngest outlaw there ever was. People chased me down, but I left them laying in red dust; that is, until Sherriff Garrett tracked me down snuck around the back of my hideout. I asked Bucky who is it? Turns out God had been looking for me since my mother died. He filled me with lead. The hell was too full inside me: like a saguaro that don’t know how to keep in its water.

There was this one time . . . I stood before the prison guard who begged for life as I pressed my barrel to his nose. He asked me my name: said he would hold me accountable for my actions before God. He asked me what my father done named me. I said that my name was William and it means desire or conqueror: but that I didn’t have a father and I didn’t want one either. How can a boy know how to be a man if a man never teaches him how to shed the rattlesnake skin of his youth?

Damnation is the easy part. It happens before you die. So when that Sherriff stood over me to watch me let all the fire out to burn the wretched earth I wanted to thank him. Hell is all I ever known: and I assure you, it’s much cooler under the ground. I never did wear that shirt, not at least til my funeral where I was buried covered with gunpowder and exit wounds

“The Kid” + “The Little Lord of Vermin” are both previously published in Fuck Art, Let’s Dance Issue #014

"The Kid" was recorded as a collaboration with several artists under the name Fox and the Vineyards, namely Matt Graham from Raleigh, NC who plays guitar on this track as well as having produced it for distribution. Samuel J Fox is the author and vocalist.