The Oregon Trail sold death
without caskets
I pause the game but your heart still beats
slowly. I rest the oxen, sing you folk songs
about mining a future west of Fort Kearney.
We hide from typhoid behind trees suffocating
the earth, but it still catches child #2, Wendy,
and your heart drops like a bowling ball down
a sewer. We always ford the river but today the swell
is God’s stomachache, and we lose two oxen.
Christopher, child #1, falls into a ditch
of rattlesnakes. Venom like whoa.
Death eats grass and the weeds wrap around
the wagon’s wheels, cracking the axel.
I can’t fix the axel, so we have to trade
40 bullets to a banker from Boston. Your ankles
are showing and a bulge is showing in the banker
from Boston, so I shoot him and take the bullets back.
On a night too lonely for color, you find blood
in places where blood should not be. Your tears
are a muted computer screen. Your dysentery is my dysentery.
I hold your hand and your eyes are milk. I tell you Soon.
Soon zombies will walk the earth, pouring salt
on open wounds. Today my fever kills my appetite,
and the bear I shot is rotting the end of the world.