Corwin Ericson
Squanto’s Lament
Offshore there are floating factories pregnant with pilgrims.
Buckle their hats and shoes, pin their cloaks with cockle shells,
pump them full of piety and fire them off at me.
My grounds are pocked with pilgrim craters.
One can sell their buckles for scrap or collect them for redemption;
they make passable fertilizer but gloomy conversation.
Tamed pilgrims stand in place like rotten teeth;
in pens, they neither reproduce, nor fight, nor eat each other.
Last summer I sprinkled pilgrim predator urine
but it just made them pray louder. Their pelts do not cure,
they do not lay eggs, their plumage is drab.
Coach them through winter or pick up their bones each spring.
Vultures watch them forage at my feeder and when
their baths ice over, pilgrims show a genius for apocalypse.
Pilgrim with a buckskin fetish, pilgrim with musket and plague,
four and twenty pilgrims baked in pumpkin pie.
Corwin Ericson is the author of the novel Swell (Dark Coast, 2011) and Checked Out OK (Factory Hollow, 2013), a book-length found poem in the form of police reports. His poems and other works have been published in Harper's Magazine, jubilat, Conduit, and elsewhere.
Return to May 2015 Edition
Offshore there are floating factories pregnant with pilgrims.
Buckle their hats and shoes, pin their cloaks with cockle shells,
pump them full of piety and fire them off at me.
My grounds are pocked with pilgrim craters.
One can sell their buckles for scrap or collect them for redemption;
they make passable fertilizer but gloomy conversation.
Tamed pilgrims stand in place like rotten teeth;
in pens, they neither reproduce, nor fight, nor eat each other.
Last summer I sprinkled pilgrim predator urine
but it just made them pray louder. Their pelts do not cure,
they do not lay eggs, their plumage is drab.
Coach them through winter or pick up their bones each spring.
Vultures watch them forage at my feeder and when
their baths ice over, pilgrims show a genius for apocalypse.
Pilgrim with a buckskin fetish, pilgrim with musket and plague,
four and twenty pilgrims baked in pumpkin pie.
Corwin Ericson is the author of the novel Swell (Dark Coast, 2011) and Checked Out OK (Factory Hollow, 2013), a book-length found poem in the form of police reports. His poems and other works have been published in Harper's Magazine, jubilat, Conduit, and elsewhere.
Return to May 2015 Edition