Philip Miller

Summer '24

Your hard gut lies in a heap,

loops of root like fossil intestine,

your trunk sliced clean and uprooted

and dumped to rot, like a shot hostage,

a full stop on the banks of the stream,

a mark that renders all the preceding

time worthless. What sorrows you hold circular

in your corpse, what springs you have seen.

Wrist deep

in fowl slime,

pity clings on

to this poor,

violated bird.

I take an oyster

and feed it to the cat,

that purrs

like a burning wood.

Driving across

South Dakota in ‘99,

that fuming summer,

we passed shrieking

archipelagos of pain.

Our Chrysler steamed

and we dined on it,

eggs fried on the bonnet.

The open carcass is riven.

Stripped, mauled, and torn

of all that made it real.

When it comes to the scales,

how should we be forgiven?

Philip Miller Is a writer based in Edinburgh, Scotland. His novels include The Blue Horse (2015), All The Galaxies (2017), The Goldenacre (2022) and The Hollow Tree (2024) and his poetry has been published online and in print. His first collection Blame Yourself will be published in 2024 through Nine Pens Press.