Poetry Wednesday
This week’s poem is “All the Trimmings,” by Valerie Nieman, excerpted from her collection Wake Wake Wake.
All the Trimmings
In the Chinese restaurant
he’s opening one cookie
after another, empty,
each an aperture
without an image,
chamber awaiting the bullet,
the explosion
spiraling up the vena cava
from the cardiologist’s glove,
quack line-reader
finding fate lopped short
at the foot of thumb hill
in the palm’s moist meadow,
relentless squaring
of the field under the machine,
a shrieking fawn
in the haymaker’s arms,
his boots locating one front hoof
then the other.
