Celia Watson Seupel

Three from NIGHT FEET, Part I: Rummaging for Meat

The Meatman

“Hoy! Hoy!” cries the meatman.
“Hoy!” cries the butcher.
“Come get your meat!
Come to me! Come to me!”
The little pigs run to the butcher,
the old sows, the suspicious boars,
the fat barrows wagging their hindquarters.
The meatman chops a joint with his chopper,
throws it to the little pigs.
The old sow drags away a head by its long hair.
Some little pigs run around the corner,
run into me where I’m
hiding behind the door. They snuff
the smell of feces, sour urine,
stare with their piggy eyes.
A fat barrow comes sauntering,
fastidious slender leg in his jaws.
He grunts, nudges the little pigs on,
glances curiously at me, saunters on.
I peep back though the crack in the door.
“Somebody’s got to pay for all this,” mutters
the butcher, wiping his hands on his apron.


Waking in the House of Shambles

I pass from room to room
   into grey light.
From the great hooks hangs
        fresh meat,
  the dark smooth buttock
  of a black man, a woman’s
  arm flayed back,
  bone shining forth like restless light,
torsos hung by the chest without
   their sweet coverlets of skin.

Perfect stillness
   roosts upon the scene,
the tracks of its henny feet
spattering the floor, under
   rickety chairs turned over

the pool of its radiant voice
    seeping into wood
staining blonde wood black.

I set up a chair, sit,
    try to remember how I got here.
There is only a dream:

            Two men
            walk slowly down the road.
            Wind flutters their clothes.
            A flock of birds
            wheels against the sun.
            A bush, crowded with red berries,
            bursts upward with crows.
            The men’s clothing
                       suddenly flutters away
            and then the men themselves grow
                       huge with iridescent feather,
            and shamble into the sky.


Here

Here, where darkness rocks himself in the corner

Here, where silence shuffles
            back and forth behind the doorsill

Here, where catatonic desire repeats
            over and over the same position

Here, where yesterday tosses his bell-capped head,
            struts and yaws behind you

Here, where tomorrow tiptoes slyly,
            a finger to his lips, beckoning

Here, where father keeps posing as the Holy Ghost,
            sobbing, offering gouts of his shadowy flesh

Here, where mother rocks with little
            crows pecking at her mouth for words

Here, the floor slippery with blood
Here, the huds of meat shadowing the dark
Here, the bodies sprawled and twisted

Here, where love shambles in through the door,
            looks up, opens his mouth
            that we may crawl across the fleshy sill
            into the heart of the only house we know


About the Author

Celia Watson Seupel is a poet and journalist living in New York City and High Falls, NY. Her poems have appeared in various literary magazines and her two books of poetry, The Drum and the Melody and Night Feet were published by The Smith Press. She is also author of a memoir, Eating the Shadow, as well as two books on career choices. Her essays and articles have been published by The New York Times, cnbc.com, and in a variety of magazines and websites. She received her MFA in poetry as well as her MS in Journalism from Columbia University and taught business writing for many years at New York University.

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