from THE BOOK OF DANIEL
Dan Fitt-Palmer
1
highborn Levantine abductions
guiltless testificandum
skinnier muscle
lustful butchery
The king of the universe has a small palace. Three other young men are with me, our reddening forearms bound to one another. Shining metalled, leering courtiers expect us to grasp for their unclean food. The king
himself has a long flame-shaped beard, and guesses at the flavour of our stomach skin, which of us has the straightest shaft, who will try to kill him first.
2
unabashedly mercurial
commingling
mystical identifying
earthen mastery
Between the mud and straw roof and the baked brick floor, the king lies in afternoon sweat, his eyelids fluttering like a moth in my hands. At dinner he asks me what it meant. After my peers flatter and fumble at the doors
of his pleasure, I explain that his empire, the universe, will drift and cool until every death and festival and sword and skull and mother will be more than forgotten.
3
leadership successors
monolingual
desecrated
obliquely outstretching
The new king is full of wine and giggling. His friends have poured him yet more laughter from holy vessels, and my hand stirs a pot of nouns and verbs while I sleep. I have grown a beard since one universe ended and the next began; my eyebrows are darker than when I arrived in the capital; coins with ugly
faces I have known appear in my room every time I speak slowly or softly. This is to say, when I blow my anger like a wind from Jerusalem, the universal ruler shakes. The blade placed in his mouth by demons or angels is fresh and sharp the next morning.
4
judicious assassins
punishment lawmakers
descent excavate
hunters until
A third sun eclipses the second, and it warms me; the world still spins. More jealousy in the chests of those less beautiful. Dreams and linen, the blood of oxen and goat entrails, everything, everything, everything, always. This time not the maddened king; this time not my pressing his lips to read the vowels they cannot form;
this time not the white-haze furnace that beckoned my wailing friends, but a pit. A rocky hollow where lionesses are yawning and pressing their hot guts to the shaded stone. My angelic lover and I bare our feet in this temple. Our last act of prayer saves me forever, and I pull on his hair, splitting the dawn.
