After the Farm

by Rachel Yoder

My generation, we know
close to nothing of the ice man

his monstrous hooks,
the coming and going

of the gaunt black dude,
Simon and his piss jug

all the other long-nailed wanderers
of whom we now refer as nothing.

More than modern-day miracles,
we will never know

your dead brother, neither blood
on the brain nor farmhouse

diminished to code:
mounds and holes

in steaming black
ash on snow

*

Instead, we wrap our fists around
long necks, suck down
what's been verboten for years.

Girls kiss girls
Boys cry
We desire

beer, weapons, anything
that deadens, not heaven
not hell, but our pleasures

in an empty-palmed earth

*

They would turn in their graves, you say
and they do.  Back home

underground Amishmen squeal
like old-fashioned augers through knotted wood

Others turn as if on spits obliging the earth
to churn, to blister up like lepers' skin

their work in death not unlike worms
which you always told me were good

but which
                            I still have not grown to believe