by Stuart Buck
on my way to school every day i passed a battery chicken farm
it smelled so bad i would ask my mother what was inside and
she would always say the madness of man she did not eat meat
for years but now that her eyes are clouding with milk her morals
have broken. i saw a movie where they burnt the beaks off newborn
chicks they shot them down a funnel like awful yellow clouds they
burn the end of their beaks to stop them cannibalizing each other
the film said. bite my lips when you kiss me and my inside blood
will taste like rust admit that we are nothing but pink water agitating
the light around us admit that you are scared, of the office work, of
dying. its ok. some of us are just now realizing dust is bits of people
Stuart Buck is a visual artist and award-winning poet living in North Wales. His art has been featured in several journals, as well as gracing the covers of several books. His third poetry collection, Portrait of a Man on Fire, is forthcoming from Rhythm & Bones Press in November 2020. When he is not writing or reading poetry he likes to cook, juggle, and listen to music. He suffers terribly from tsundoku—the art of buying copious amounts of books that he will never read.
Emerge Literary Journal 