No Fall

This is the world after the fruit’s first bite: puffy white caps open, decay. 

Mist glazed highways, wipers blinking, fields choked with spongy grapes.

On the way to winemaking, M and I pass liberty corner where turkey vultures huddle

around a deer carcass, peck rubber masks into its flank.

Lately, I suspect something has spoiled inside me, mottled as bark 

flaking, a trunk growing beyond the body’s capacity

to contain. I take a picture of the birds neck-deep in death 

scrawl across the photo as a joke: I love him this much.

The way his hands hammer dents from the press’ rim, bail Sangioveses into a stainless 

mesh basket, graze my back as juice flows into the moat encircling the machine.

Cropped, the photo omits the buck’s purple heart 

quivering, intestines trailing a rigid hide. Instead, the shoulders of birds

hunch as though mourning what they are: their simmering

hunger for decomposition, not the untouchable

kettle of the soul, merely hunger. 

Dried feathers rigid as comb’s teeth.