Some dissembling required, I admit by Richard Weaver

the world is not my oyster, not my cray-craw-or-crabfish, mudbug, yabby or crustacean of choice. I don’t crack bivalves to harvest who or what I am. I eat them with sauce, spicy, spicy sauce, fresh made with real horseradish and enjoy the slithering as they make their way down. But philosophy, ontology, whatever osophy or ology you devise, bores me intensely. The heart is not a stomach or the brain a digestive tract. We eat. We consume. We are consumed in turn by fire or earth, and sometimes water. The wind blows north. Then northeast. Even as your name is written DaVinci-like in a sand mirror, the letters become faceless; no honor accrues. Only 20 year old barrel-proof whiskey emptying on your newly cut grave. Acting the maggot some would say. You especially. The water of life others argue. Aqua vitae. Usquebaugh in Gaelic. Rendered usky. Poured. Blended with thirsty earth. Stirred with grief and a twist of sláinte-rhyme. From some sound no harmony rises.

Richard Weaver resides in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor where he volunteers with the Maryland Book Bank, acts as the Archivist-at-large for a Jesuit college, and is a seasonal snowflake counter (unofficially). Recent poems have appeared in OxMag, Red Eft Review, Crack the Spine, Juxtaprose, Misfit, and Conjunctions. Forthcoming work will appear in Clade Song, Dead Mule, & Magnolia Review.