To tempt a god with sweet meats

Taylor Supplee

The ferryman stakes his gnarled yew pole deep
into the marsh, dragging the length of his light hulk 

along, flashing his silver tooth at the minnows; deprived
of my suicide, and knowing this—

whatever bequest I have is not worth giving.
The weaver takes and offers

a cloth to be bound around the eyes
as prisoners are lined up along the crumbling city

square for the firing squad. Hostage to it,
that all my desires might be lecherous

and all-knowing; aspirin-thinned to a wrist
spun in the hottest bath I have ever taken. First

cut’s bitter tease, door opening, punishing
abstained. Everything I want to know and don’t

harms me. Our limb ended in a wolfish claw storming
epileptic through the briars’ moon-veiled sacrilege—

serving up my own flesh on a tray of vittles
familiar with crude bones in the shape

of pending dread. Household gods
quit the hearth, knowing better than to stay

for a meal broken in a fitful howl, supplicant of rage—
Come to my table, eat. No need to fear the knife.

Taylor Supplee earned his MFA from Columbia University where he served as the Lucie Brock-Broido Teaching Fellow. A finalist for the Greg Grummer Poetry Prize in 2020, and the 92Y Discovery Award in Poetry in 2019, his poems are forthcoming and have appeared in Baltimore Review, Foothill Poetry Journal, Hotel Amerika, Hunger Mountain, Image, The Moth, phoebe, Rattle, SLAB, Quiddity, and elsewhere. He is the editor of Hg and lives in Kansas City.