by Lillian B. Kennedy
The night the dead
come home to roost
like this
picture from Abu Ghraib. Who
wears the dunce cap now?
Who
dances the puppet’s fractured stance
in the Headless Horseman’s cloak?
What barrage of boots
lines up for recruits’
cornucopian buses
to explode? Whose
birthright blood
or apostolic relic? All Hallows
Eve, the haggard faces,
the rent fabric
of embers like scopes
in the desert. The long procession
of Good Friday chants
bearing up crosses
transatlantic, noosed
in the KKK. Who
rigs up the tortured
to look like wizards? Who
names the saints
of eves that detonate days?
Lillian Baker Kennedy, author of Tomorrow After Night (Bay River Press, 2003) and Notions (Pudding House, 2004) practices law and lives in an old cape bordered by wild roses in Auburn, Maine. A part-time instructor at USM L-A, Kennedy is a Pushcart nominee and graduate of Stonecoast’s MFA program. Kennedy’s poetry has been anthologized, exhibited and published in numerous small presses and is forthcoming this fall in the Comstock Review and Puckerbrush Review. An interview, critical essay on poetics and some poems are available online.
