by Cliff Saunders
after William Gass
The lovely countryside was filled with suicides.
They drowned themselves in rain barrels.
They ate the heads off matches. They became hermits.
Shack-wacky, their large eyes like dials,
the women relied on patent medicines and madness.
O Mary Sweeney, you compulsive window-breaker!
Even the dogs were docile, cow-jawed, stiff
as porcelain, with nothing in front of them
but a lens as cold and darkly caped as God’s eye.
Cliff Saunders is the author of several poetry chapbooks, including Mapping the Asphalt Meadows (Slipstream Publications) and The Persistence of Desire (Kindred Spirit Press). His poems have appeared recently in Quadrant, Pictura Journal, The Rockford Review, Concision Poetry Journal, and Portrait of New England.
Little Leaf Literary Journal 