Damon Hubbs
A Hole to Hide a Feud
Death lives upstream
And keeps a Derby spider in a matchbox,
Eight legs like dreaming power lines
Eight eyes like black burgonets.
Ours is in the grassblade waiting,
Fed on milk
A spat of saliva
Dark as an iron cap.
Death’s nose is a rotted hole.
He hangs upside down from a dried leather tree
Watching residents march a gaggle
Of geese three miles to the county fair.
From the swayback porch of Cattown Rd.
We write a childhood newspaper;
Father falls off a cord of wood,
Mother’s heart capers in a gilded cage.
Death noses the neighbor’s farm
Looking for a hole to hide a feud.
The moon rubs an ink pot on its white dress.
A column of birds give bad advice.
The neighbor is a girl in glass.
She breaks down like juvenilia,
Stomach a pitwheel of stones.
The boy from the fair wants his letters returned.
Death lives upstream
Cutting out the paper patter of our feet.
We fish Fly Creek with a bucket of bones,
Walleyed without armor, our spider dethroned.
Damon Hubbs is the poetry editor at Blood+Honey and The Argyle Magazine. He’s the author of the full-length collection Venus at the Arms Fair (Alien Buddha Press, 2024). Recent publications include The Gorko Gazette, Horror Sleaze Trash, Synchronized Chaos, Hobart, Utriculi, and others. His next book, Bullet Pudding, is forthcoming from Roadside Press in 2026. Damon’s poems have been nominated for the Pushcart and Best of the Net. He lives in New England.
Banner Art:
Photo by Jon Butterworth, Unsplash, 2019
