Al Maginnes
The man fell to the ground in the deep hours beyond midnight
and then, but for a few flickering muscles, was still.
The blood coming from his body congealed, and he lay inside
his own unraveling as light rolled forward, dew wetting his shoulders,
his unadorned head. He might have been there until vultures came,
but morning brought one of the land’s owners to look around the place.
That morning, the landowner was in a place of wonder
and unexpected contentment. Last night, after a spell too long
to count, he and his wife found themselves making love
the way they did when they first discovered one another. It was
from that glaze of good-being that he first saw the body,
stark under the noon sun, before nature began its work.
The sheriff took the call, made a U-turn and sped
back the way he had come. Dead bodies with tracked up arms
and head wounds, blood from knives and cheap guns
cropped up in ditches and abandoned lots, in empty houses
way too often, a malignant crop fertilized by meth, oxys,
bad spouses and poverty, the endless carousel of luck gone bad.
The man who lived in the body is something other
by now. In seconds, he discovered more joy than his life
down here ever prepared him for. A joy that unknits him so gently
he is not aware at first that he no longer exists, even while
the body he inhabited is measured, poked, pried open.
The landowner stays until the last lawman and K-9
is gone. Then he drives home to tell his wife the name
of the man found on their land. Tonight, they will
make love once more, their bodies green and supple for those
moments, vessels so well-fitted that he surrenders a small tear
because he had no other name for this so-often beautiful life.
—from Rattle #89, Fall 2025
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