And This Your Gift For Our Bounty

And this your gift/ For our bounty… “Wake up to reality, nothing goes as planned in this accursed world”— Madara Is it religious for a prayer mat to welcome a man who is saturated with his own chlorinated tears? There are many ways to strip a body and carve it, a door, for anything but sweetness. My eyes have eaten too much bitterness, it can no longer filter hollow from hope. I said to my wife that on the resurrection sunday we would slow dance with turkey swimming in our throats, with our children wielding their forks over the last sausage as their smiles chew the sun, with God burning love until it finds its way into our nostrils. Tsk tsk tsk, doesn’t reality rewrite our dreams with an aim of capitalizing horror? There were days my wife’s phobia for knives had us dice onions with our own teeth. But today, fear dies at her feet as she dislodges a matchet from her dissection kit. I sourly chuckle at reality’s way of arranging metaphors; how my sinless wife morphed into a killer, beats me; how my son, cut for dinner, is another metaphor that leaves my jaw on fine dust. The kitchen smells like a hunter soaked in a litter of his prey’s blood. God won’t let death visit twice, so we feed on him tonight, she whispers. Was there an option? I dare to reply; for we either let hunger pipe out our lives or turn our children’s body to grilled turkey. Hunger is madness, and my spouse plays the victim. I peep into the soul of a woman reshaped by fate; the curves my hands once fondled like a trophy are now bones bonded by an economized skin. Reality says, you would first eat your humanity before god sends a lamb…