Poem: No Santa

 

No Santa

 

while crows funnel

in a cloud of rotten milk and

meat and raucous bickers as

sharp as lacerated bottles and

cans and curses of wing,

a pimpled putrid smell

curdles the notrils of the children

who kick paint cans to fiddle their fingers

under a helter-skelter of ripe diapers and

tinfoil and cardboard-vegetable muck,

children whose forearms delve down deep

in the disgust of flavors of grime,

hunting for a 5¢ prize of fungible plastic,

children who trudge to hunker,

fat black garbage bags on their backs,

and who look not at all like elves

who tote nonexistent toys

for no Santa.

 

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