Weak Devotions. Luke Hankins
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the mud itself along with their prey.
We hosed them down and hoped they wouldn’t vomit in the house
when they had dried.
I watched cardinals hunting food and singing
in the yard, the dogs huffing on the sun-hot patio.
I brought the dogs inside,
but one was limping now
and looking down with glazed eyes.
We noticed a swollen leg, and laid the trembling dog down
as he died.
Cottonmouth, dad said.
~
I knew the prayers we’d been brought up to say—
Your kingdom come,
your will be done on earth
as it is in heaven.
I took dad’s shovel and dug a hole big enough for a kid like me.
There were roots and stones, so it took hours.
Dad had come out
to say he would finish it, then later that it was big enough,
but I wouldn’t let him stop me. I kept on digging,
thinking Whose will is this?
I finally went inside. My hands had blistered
and the blisters had broken against the handle
and they were raw and bleeding. I rinsed my hands
and bandaged them.
I remember thinking about Christ, trying to make
myself mean it as I said
Well, damn—if God can die, then so can I
before I fell asleep.
Louisiana
In Pineville, Dad would chop the heads
of cottonmouths off with a flat-head shovel
and the bodies would spurt blood and writhe
as if in anger. I almost had my head taken off
by a flat-head shovel in the hands of a neighbor boy—
no lie—and was pissed on by another—
and who knows why? Once, I watched a 5-year-old
pull the trigger of a pellet gun
aimed at the belly of another boy
and he ran screaming up the hill to his house.
We learned later that the lead curved upwards
and almost reached his heart, almost killed him.
The police officer questioned me the next day
in my home, and I identified the weapon—
identical to one I used to hunt snakes in the creek.
After telling him of the eerie proclamation
I witnessed—“I’m going to shoot you”—
and the immediate, reasonless violence that followed,
I cried, then lay on Mother’s lap in silence on the couch.
I imagined the holes tunneled through his liver
by the hot metal hungry for his heart
and I renounced my own rifle.
Inventory
Rusted cans, split bottles,
fallen branches and spilt nails,
busted fence-posts, stones
and scraps of steel,
heavy tire rims, broken rails, strings
of barbed wire and a thousand
things that catch fire
or that swing or sting
or separate bones with their weight . . .
If you know how to look,
there are weapons everywhere.
Blood
I’ve drawn blood
from others, in my childhood,
even friends and kin—
slit the heavy garment
of skin or split sinus caves
with my hard fist.
Very young, I cried
if my sister hurt herself.
Later, her hot blood slicked
my hammering hand—
that hurt was, more
than hers, my own.
And she wept for me.
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