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MURDER BALLAD
Kissing the ignorant fiends as they
bless the sequined saints
undoubtedly
leaves an estranged taste in the mouth
before words can come up
like vomit.
Sissies aren’t invited to the wedding
of the unified front and
the secret
decision to remove all dissidents
forcefully and without
remorse.
Humane treatment has foregone an
appeal, since several guilty
verdicts
in a row have passed the same sentence:
life in a prison cell with a bay
window.
Wrap your fingers around it reflexively,
like an infant, and gorge
yourself
on the milk of human kindness that flows
from two breasts named Love
and Plenty.
Wildly but rapidly, the fried remainders
of the corpses still wail, as if
it could
matter to anyone who escaped the same
faulty logic as it cracked open
wide.
Sing a murder ballad, as though it might
tell the story of how we died
some more
waiting for a rebirth from an old method
that never really worked
anyway.
Foster Dickson is the creative writing teacher at an arts magnet high school and was formerly an editor and production manager at NewSouth Books. He was a book reviewer for Foreword Reviews from 2001-2005 and a staff writer for King Kudzu, Montgomery’s (Alabama) alternative newspaper, from 2001-2004. His poems have appeared in Zygote in my Coffee, Red River Review, My Favorite Bullet, Filibuster, Churches, Banks & Bars, Snow Monkey, The SiNK, Poor Mojo’s Almanac, Stick Your Neck Out, The Wissahickon, Pemmican, remark, Antithesis Common, and the Alabama State Poetry Society’s Sampler. Foster has one poetry chapbook, Kindling Not Yet Split (Court Street Press, 2002).
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