haram

tariq shah

Our backyard cottonwood’s rent in twain by your wayward lightning bolt,
and the shy stud farmer who long ago parceled off his land and gave calico
kittens to us free of charge's haystacks go up, touched off by your three sons 
monkeying with a flint igniter recovered in a crawl space’s gravel–a bright 
idea only the pond survived, fringed in the carbon of a sin, an O upon the 
wild field's tiger striped char,
                                             and when night falls, that’s where our world
collects, slurped back into the blistered quicksilver mirror, I face life
without parole, a priceless moon built to hang by anything and everything
unclean, having to slap my siblings off their high horse, through a black
wishbone’s twin forking lyric: arson was your séance, The Hidden He
smiting us and all who seek ascension by His grace and gilt ladder.