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    Reasons to Leave the Slaughter
    Reasons to Leave the Slaughter
    Reasons to Leave the Slaughter
    Ebook90 pages26 minutes

    Reasons to Leave the Slaughter

    By Ben Clark

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    About this ebook

    Reasons to Leave the Slaughter speaks of a rural landscape, this “farm life,†will lure you in, draw you down to the pond for afternoons of fishing, picking mulberries, and climbing trees. It is also a place of broken limbs, animals dying every season, storms raging down on the flimsy shell called home. Reasons to Leave the Slaughter speaks of the balance between our desperate human need to “own†land, to have a place, a home, and to control it with fences and property lines. This book also calls upon nature’s constant battling back, crushing plans and hopes with an infestation of one pest or another, a tornado crumpling new buildings into dust, an animal’s death. This book revels in the discoveries of youth, the hopes and despairs of growing old without seeming purpose and the ever-present balance of beauty within brutality.

    Ben Clark’s poems understand the weirdness of living, of loving and being loved, of grit and breath and what bangs around in our everyday bodies. Made of asphalt and sweat and farm dirt, these are honest, important poems. I love their singing. - Marty McConnell, author

    Clark's voice welds tension to narrative so seamlessly, we can scarcely tell sometimes where the literal ends and the wonder begins. His, is an armageddon of tension holding together taut strands of unbelievable beauty and charismatic curiosity. -Roger Bonair-Agard, “Tarnish and Masquerade"
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWrite Bloody Publishing
    Release dateAug 13, 2010
    ISBN9781935904335
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      Book preview

      Reasons to Leave the Slaughter - Ben Clark

      Copyright © Ben Clark 2011

      No part of this book may be used or performed without written consent from the author, if living, except for critical articles or reviews.

      Clark, Ben.

      1st edition.

      ISBN: 978-1-935904-32-8

      Interior Layout by Lea C. Deschenes

      Cover Designed by Debra Kayes

      Cover Photo by Todd Brown

      Interior Illustrations by Joshua Cotter

      Proofread by Patty Petelin

      Edited by Elise Paschen, Sherry Antonini and Marty McConnell

      Type set in Helvetica by Linotype, Aller and Bergamo: www.theleagueofmoveabletype.com

      Special thanks to Lightning Bolt Donor, Weston Renoud

      Printed in Tennessee, USA

      Write Bloody Publishing

      Long Beach, CA

      Support Independent Presses

      writebloody.com

      To contact the author, send an email to writebloody@gmail.com

      For Kate

      REASONS TO LEAVE THE SLAUGHTER

      REASONS TO LEAVE THE SLAUGHTER

      Pasture

      Apology

      Fishing

      At One Hundred, A Miracle

      Night Shift

      There’s A Beast Roaming

      The Architecture Of Obsession

      Breaking

      Mother

      What We Do For Fun Around Here #1

      Death/Wish

      Summer

      On Your Birthday

      What We Do For Fun Around Here #2

      Father

      My Father Explains His Birth

      To My First Love’s Soon-To-Be Child

      Defense

      Gift

      What We Do For Fun Around Here #3

      No Tamer, No Butcher, No Hunter

      When A Crop Duster Sees A Body

      A Destruction Of Cats Discovers You

      Walking On Water

      Beard Cycle

      What We Do For Fun Around Here #4

      Olive Saloon

      After Olive, Above Bakery

      Grandfather

      What We Do For Fun Around Here #5

      Smothering Behind The Silos

      You May Never Meet My Son

      Guesswork

      Root

      A Few Reasons We Left The Farm

      Growing Up On Grain

      Grandmother

      What We Do For Fun Around Here #6

      My Younger Brother Explains

      How To Lose A Younger Brother

      Slaughter

      About The Author

      Acknowledgments

      PASTURE

      Tired at last with prayer, I leave my bedside

      and stalk the farm with an old wooden bat

      murdering lightning bugs and envisioning angels

      in fatal flutters—wings smeared across

      the sky. Handfuls of crushed abdomens still dimly lit

      I rub on my face and palms like war paint. Anointed,

      I swing feral at the moon and stars

      picturing a frightened god and

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