The Crow Proposes, by Geoffrey Heeren

First snow then a crow fell on the road
to Allenwood, like a pail of offal tossed
from a window, without any sign
that it had mastered flight,
but with the welcoming odor of whiskey.

Listen, Sam, the bird said.
Felicitations on bagging the Allen
daughter, that birth sprig Eliza,
a real appaloosa of coal thoughts
and snow hair. But watch it,

before long she'll wish for children
to drop their snowballs and kill you,
for a wind to deliver her to perfect
obscurity; mark you she will burn
every tintype of herself until she dies.

History will remind her of your eyes,
so she will always hate history.
She's not your kind of girl. She's the type
to be bloomed and rung with bluebells,
the cerulean will of belfries and flowers.

Not the animal hunger --
to take or be taken, and how else
Gov’nor Houston, can you love?
Lock her in a room without water?
Show her the wound of your groin,

your black-feathered demon?
Listen. What do you need a wife for?
We could have something real.
A hot land with crackling skin,
in the crook of the South, where the sky

will blow with our black brains,
where the battlefields will stare
up as we peck their eyes,
plant pecans, livestock, trash,
the things that we will eat together.

Dick Cheney Speaks to Me in a Dream by Campbell McGrath

The tree wells with sap, the sponge expands with brine
a dishrag yields so much before it wrings dry,
it ends, it concludes, it terminates,
and you would tremble with fear to hear the briefings,
to see the demarcated targets--a certain fast food restaurant
where teh women resemble butchered turkeys
in running shoes and polyester pants,
obese children waving their sad little bologna arms--
this was a McDonald’s in Ohio, I believe,
but I can't speak to that directly, I cannot stipulate,
Ohio or possibly Oklahoma, I do not recall the particulars,
or choose not to, an heuristic of blindness, if you will.
The point is this: these are the lame zebras,
the slow wildebeest at the watering hole,
and the judicious response is to cull the herd,
a calibrated rebalancing akin to natural selection,
which by no means contradicts intelligent design--
survival of the fittest is a free market paradigm.
And we have a full menu of implementation options,
amazing, some of the prototypes I've signed off on,
the know-how, the technology of this ordinance.
To reflect honestly, I am awed at our place in the schema,
I am awed at the nimbus, almost a translucency,
the light shining through solid objects,
we have so much to be thankful for and the prisoner
wants to take that from us, but he will talk,
and when he does we will have the right team in place,
the appropriate people to make sense of his jabbering,
officers and specialists, magnificently trained,
folks who have dedicated their entire lives to this pursuit.
Freedom is a tough monkey but we will make him sing.