49 The sun drips down, a blood orange leaking
Soul Bar
over thick pines piercing a blackened sky.
Jennifer Brough
When it sets, the spooks chatter up trees and jive their bones in dead heat near route 85.
This dive-bar?s doors are always open beneath a neon red buzz. Out back, a flowing needle hums with memories inked on skin. On a stool, the shaman sits palms up, spirits in mind and glass, he speaks of running with jackals to catch a burning moon.
His hair stands on end as patrons slither towards him, graveyard of wandering bones with hollow eyes. He opens a book of leather bound tricks wrapped in fur and recites to the zombie congregation sipping toxic cocktails.
Electric lights flicker then cut; lanterns spread their glow like growing leaves. Peeling back his shirt, the shaman reveals a window on his chest full of empty desert lands. The eerie drinkers sharpen their bottle-bottomed lenses.
Conjuring buffalo, wild cats, horses, roaming free and rolling through life cycles in their wake, skin stripped to bones to ash to birth to run revolving round until a thunderclap rains phone wires that plummet to the ground and suck land dry till everything upon it chimes but no one answers. Mutations writhe on junkyard piles, dripping acid over tin shacks of wise men beating out messages with fire and blood, popping skulls like berries into a vast cauldron of cracked TV screens gurgling nuclear waste in pulsing waves.
The shaman shuts the book, turning down his palms. His audience are piles of salt when the hand of divine rings out closing time.