& Delilah – Brandon Thurman

On the wet bed of stones
by the creek, you slip

your sharpened scissors
along the nape of my neck,

& madness itches down
my shirtless back, a second life
of cells furring my bare feet.

As you cut, I clip my nails past the quick,
a housebroken beast who’d rather bleed
than scratch. All the scraps of men

& women I won’t be, we sweep out
to the birds. Too easy to call me Samson.

Call me the donkey’s jawbone
that only wished to rest.

Say we’re the pair of foxes
freed into the field,
one torch tied to our two tails.

I’ll be the lion carcass if you be
the honey cupped in its gut, churning
slowly to mead. Outside, in the rafters

above our porch,
a blind bird

is hatching into a home
woven from my hair.

Brandon Thurman is the author of the chapbook Strange Flesh (Quarterly West, 2018). His poetry can be found in The Adroit Journal, Beloit Poetry Journal, Nashville Review, RHINO, and others. He lives in the Arkansas Ozarks with his husband and son.