Not long ago, my parents gave me a copy of the issue with this in it, which they’d apparently been holding onto. This poem is now almost as old as I was when I wrote it.

Just now, I went back to read it again, because Wood’s got me thinking of taking up some poetry again (Haiku Year notwithstanding). I include this thing here at Jet Pack as an excerpt of myself, I guess. I’ve resisted the urge to revise the language or spelling.

June 17th, 1994, 10:38:09 p.m.

I was on my way home,
tapping behind 49th Ave.,
prepped for a night of sit-com
boredom and empty phones,
when, or perhaps a moment before,
a pair of grim-clad stereotypes emerged
as though they had been poured
out of a thick fluid from some economy-buy jug,
out of the cardboard, shadow, and crate walls
of one’s junior-high impressions of New York.

One clicked out a ditty
he’d been working on all morning
as the taller one demanded,
with knife in hand and his army of playground strategy,
that I “fork over some green,”
and “quick buddy.”
Actually, it was a switchblade
or more of a butterfly,
like a bayou sidearm or bucknife, bayonet.
When I say bayonet
I mean saber, katana,
six feet of wood with a spear’s head,
a pole-arm or wickedly toothed halberd.
A Tomcat or F-15 Eagle
with ICBM emplacements,
except more like an orbital defense platform
capable of smoking Chicago
and me
if I didn’t produce some bread,
which I did.

Ingersoll does not touch them. His own fingertip floats above them, as if following along with the text of a children’s book or a Bible page. He nods and mumbles something in the affirmative. To everyone else, it’s inscrutable, but to him, it’s something as plain as day, no less clear than a highway billboard.

“Good,” he says, obviously satisfied. He scoops the bones back up, and places them in the pouch once more. He kisses the pouch the way one might kiss his mother.

He stands again, and looks in Randy’s red, raw eyes.

“You stopped buying from us,” Ingersoll says. He licks his lips, shaking his head. “That is a shame. I like to think we offer a solid product for reasonable prices. But you can save yourself here, you know. You will whisper in my ear what it is I want to know. You will tell me all you can of your new supplier. If I am satisfied, if you tell me what I need, then I will spare your life, and instead only take one of your hands for its bones. Are we clear?”

Whimpering behind his own blood-caked sock, Randy nods.

Ingersoll smiles, and presses his own ear to Randy’s mouth before plucking out the sock.

“Speak,” Ingersoll commands, and Randy spills it all.

• • •

Outside the meat locker, Ingersoll towels off.

The white towels, handed to him by Harriet, grow swiftly red with each wipe.

Ingersoll hands over a plastic snack-sized baggie to Harriet. Contained within are the mostly-meatless bones of not one hand, but two.

“Bleach them,” Ingersoll says. “Purify them with sage smoke. Then give them to me, I will choose which ones if any belong in my satchel.”

Harriet nods, takes the bag. She shows no signs of disgust. Frankie, on the other hand, has a look like he might throw up in his mouth.

“You,” Ingersoll says, thrusting his finger against Frankie’s sternum. The finger itself is thin, delicate, like an insect’s leg, but it still feels to Frankie like it might punch through his breastbone and puncture his heart. “Dispose of the body.”

Swallowing a hard knot of what might be puke, Frankie nods.