The Lease. Mathew Henderson
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straight up, some burr inside catches, peels off,
and the sand cuts through the pipe and into the air.
But your hands, they’re already in an X above your head,
when you remember the sign for shut the fucking well.
FIRST DAY
Everyone can tell that you’re a virgin,
that when your shot came, you were too full
of rum to do anything but bully your dick
into a condom and watch it cower.
And when Rachel said, Fuck me, you didn’t,
couldn’t, but shucked the Trojan to the floor
of Brian’s cottage where the girls would
find it later, make you go and pick it up.
They know all right. They see it in the way
you wrench, the way you tie your boots,
but they say nothing, hammering harder
and harder, sounding off for you
the hundreds they’ve taken to bed.
BUBBLES
They called him Bubbles before you met him,
flat-ass in the dirt working a snare, legs spread
like a child’s to catch and hold a rolling ball.
A man from a world without children,
he had no soft voice inside him.
He confessed it in every word, with a mouth
that knew only wood and steel, brick and earth.
His wooden hands grew into whatever tools
he touched. The day he recoloured the lease:
twelve hours of wordless painting
in prairie heat so heavy he was caught by it
like an insect trapped in the brush’s path,
licked into the colour of the pipe.
At shift’s end, you knew nothing about him,
but when you heard his name, pictured fresh red paint.
He kept one eye on a gopher hole,
closed the other to keep from blinking.
After an hour, stood suddenly with a struggling twine,
the noosed gopher scratching at air
as if the thickness of it might help him scramble out.
When he asked you what to do you spit seeds,
said, Retard. Eat it, fuck off.
Into the field until his arms go taut,
he stops, something looses inside him
and he swings the twine against the ground.
Five times, ten, until the string goes limp.
Rodent chirps on the first, and the second.
But by the third, there are already no sounds.
WHO ARE YOU OUT THERE?
The rig is between the derrick and the tongs,
and the mouths still dry from last night’s whiskey
and this morning’s dirt. They trip like it’s all they know,
like tanned gears sweating beside each other.
This lasts forever, this rigging, this tripping.
You’re no part of it. You can only watch
as they throw tongs and catch string like conversation,
watch steel slip into earth sixty feet at a time.
Tilt your head to see the swab line buck and spray,
and feel everything as the oil turns your face brown.
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