Cast your copper pennies on a dead man’s eyes,
bent old woman weaves diamonds into wine.
The fields are full of jackdaw skeletons collecting
rain in the basin of the skulls intersecting with
larvae and the loam. Spiders in the vines, violets
in their vertebrae, larkspur in their spines.
Ditchside something slowly fattens up with flies, sweats
out the sickness, thick black prize for starved bone
beggar. Feasts on the filth, dines on the dead, eats
all the crimes from the cold soft head. Paid for his
supper in fists full of gold, trades the old woman
for a skin and a scold. Tongues the squalid secrets
to her furrowed mouth, shoves her in the mud, marrow
in the ground. Fills her eyes with bergamot, lime, yarrow.
Drinks from the femur, follows sin south.
Roxanna Bennett is a Toronto-based writer and artist educator. Her work has appeared in Descant, The Fiddlehead, The Antigonish Review, The Malahat Review, Existere, in the anthology Leonard Cohen: You're Our Man and will be forthcoming in The Dalhousie Review, The Toronto Quarterly and Barrier Islands Review. Her profanity filled ranting can be found here.