death – Cajun Mutt Press

Cajun Mutt Press Featured Writer 01/09/23

January 9, 2023 James D. Casey IV

Thanksgiving Morning Thoughts About Death

I often wonder
When I will die.
I think
It has to do with objects
And my kinship with them.

One time my wife lost her blanket.
She was swaddled in it
As an infant.
When we left the hotel room,
I told her we had it with us.
I thought we did.
But I was in a hurry.
I can’t think about that blanket
Lost in the wilderness
And my wife’s incandescent, round tears
Without it being
A watershed moment of remorse.

I think about the time I yelled at her
When she wore an efflorescent blouse
Pink, with roses and butterflies.
She never wore it again.
No balm in Gilead, no sinner’s cure
Including her reassurance that a baby puked on it
Has made me remember it without contrition.

There are so many places I will not go
And people I will not see.

Charles Bronson once said
Responsibility is a big rock that weighs a ton
And it bends you until it finally buries you.
I have no idea if he is right.
He yelled that at some children on a Hollywood set.
But I don’t think
He wanted to go back
To that set
After all his caterwauling.

I’m not crazy.
(I know that every crazy person says that).
But just maybe
You die
When there is nothing left to swaddle you
And no place to go for asylum
Whether your heart stirs or not.
Charles Bronson died at 81.
Years after he had stopped
Visiting familiar places.
His hip replaced by a rock
Of scrap metal.

Alexander Poster is a good, grey bureaucrat who works as a historian for a labyrinthine federal agency. He lives less than one mile from the U.S. Capitol and survived a nasty case of COVID-19, none of which inspired his writing one bit. He is a fan of Cormac McCarthy, depressing music from the 80s and 90s, and, surprisingly, marine mammals. He loves his wife, even though she has expressed concern for him being a “cynical bastard.”

Cajun Mutt Press Featured Writer 01/04/23

January 4, 2023 James D. Casey IV

Surrogate Mother

Silence a silhouette the night the end and Time no one speaks there are words placed next to each other like mirrors no one speaks we forget everything we have to die someone screams someone is crying you don’t know who you are you don’t dare to speak you don’t dare to scream you don’t dare to sleep otherwise we will never see each other again I will never see you again the dead come out of their graves a dog passes by a grave a dog pisses on a grave I can’t sleep anymore the dog walks away another dog comes and pisses there where the first dog had peed you can’t speak anymore the dead man stays in his grave migratory birds pass in the gray sky I hear them speak I hear the birds talking to each other in the sky your mother is dead your mother is on her deathbed there is someone crying in the next room but it’s not you the dead man is in his grave he keeps on dreaming though but he dares not scream he dares not think there are dead people everywhere there are crazy people everywhere ahead of you someone is walking alone on a road it’s raining but the person keeps walking away on the road the sky is gray it’s raining you can only look at the person who’s still walking away on the road and the rain keeps falling down sometimes a car zooms by windows of all houses have their curtains drawn all shutters are closed the doors are closed the small front gardens are empty someone is praying or screaming or dreaming but it’s not you and the figure keeps on going away on the road it hasn’t quite almost vanished yet but the person seems to be crushed by the landscape seems to be crushed by the rain by the gray sky on the road hearing only the sound of cars aiming by despite the puddles hearing only the sound of rain and the wind it’s winter it’s cold it’s wet the season will never end the year is never going to end it’s almost another country it’s almost another world under the gray sky in this dead village the silhouette has disappeared for good at the turn of the road and you turn around yourself and a dog passes by you guess that he has peed on a grave he has peed on a dead man he vanishes too on the road right before the village exit to the left and then a second dog comes by who seems to follow the first one yourself you walk back on your steps to find a cemetery by the road you can guess that the dogs were coming from in there you hear the sound of migratory birds passing and talking to each other in the gray sky the rain still falling the migratory birds keeps talking while some lunatics sing in their asylum as they have already lost everything a house is on fire my body is on fire inside the landscape the painting is on fire too and I have lost everything too I am dead I open the body of a dog with a knife and I take out my stillborn baby.

Ivan de Monbrison is a schizoid writer from France born in 1969 and affected by various types of mental disorders, he has published some poems in the past, he’s mostly an autodidact.

Cajun Mutt Press Featured Writer 11/07/22

November 7, 2022 James D. Casey IV

Life with Wife #1

When we were together,
I wrote about every dead thing
I came upon in the woods.

What else is there
to write about when
you can’t write about love?

Kip Knott is a writer, photographer, art dealer, and teacher living in Ohio. His most recent book of poetry is Clean Coal Burn (Kelsay Books). His first collection of short stories, Some Birds Nest in Broken Branches, was released earlier in 2022 from Alien Buddha Press. In his spare time, he travels throughout the Midwest and Appalachia in search of lost art treasures. You can follow him on Instagram at @kip.knott and on Twitter at @kip_knott.

Cajun Mutt Press Featured Writer 08/29/22

August 29, 2022 James D. Casey IV

Full Corpse

‘96 Honda Civic found wrecked
wheels up, spinning
like feet pointing to the sky.
The grill torn loose,
kiss-wrapped around a maple.

You were dead, but not dead.
The hospital told us breathing
was your only sacrament.
There is no god in this church.

You fooled nobody.
Your mind was an effigy of dirt.
Doused with liquor, set with a cigarette.
It only smoldered.

Another funeral now.
We are trying not to laugh
in this crowdful of tears.
And the trying not to laugh
making it all the harder not to.

Maybe you will rise
and try not to laugh with us.
Belly burst, shoulders bouncing.
Full corpse.

Matthew is a poet from Central Kentucky whose works have appeared in The Russel Creek Review, Anxious Poets Society, Pegasus, Sheila-Na-Gig, and The Poetry Cove Magazine. He occasionally posts journal entries to his Instagram @thebluegrasspoet and is currently enjoying reading the poems of Derrick C. Brown, Maggie Smith, and Brendan Constantine. Matthew lives in Carbondale, Illinois with his wife Haley and their two cats, Mishka and Kimchi.

Cajun Mutt Press Featured Writer 08/03/22

August 3, 2022 James D. Casey IV

Death on a ship

She liked it better when superstition
kept her off ships – angering the sea gods
and all that. Sea gods were never her problem,
rather men clinging to life, so afraid of death
that any small gesture on her part – lack of wind,
seas unnavigable, fog, a sudden squall, scurvy,
rickets, weevils in the meal, a crack in the hull,
hurricane season in the Caribe – sent them to
throwing women overboard or carving statuesque
females with bared breasts to assuage the waves.

She knows a man can drown in the ocean
or in the bath or in his own bed. How silly
the efforts of survival, how trivial that squirming,
praying, begging need to put off what comes to all.
Were she more interested, she’d write all this
frivolity down in a self-help book – “silly things
not to do at the end.” Never liked being seasick
though, doesn’t miss the rhythm of waves,
the gulls’ cry, the endless monotony of water.

Douglas K Currier

Douglas K Currier holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Pittsburgh and writes poetry in English and Spanish. He has published in several journals: The Café Review, Main Street Rag, The Comstock Review, and others, as well as in the anthologies: Onion River: Six Vermont Poets, Getting Old, Welcome to the Neighborhood, and Poemas Zafados in North and South America. He lives with his wife in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.