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Chris Mink

Chris Mink was born and raised in Tuscaloosa, AL. He presently sweats buckets in Tallahassee while pursuing an MFA in Poetry at Florida State University. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Greensboro Review, The Chattahoochee Review, Anti-, The Offending Adam, and la fovea. Earlier work can be seen in a folder his mother keeps. 

The Mauling of a Poet

Once I pass 13^th Street and MLK, I better know somebody

or know my way out.

You’d never go there. You’re like me,

in a smoke-filled wine bar reading poems.

I take notes, wanting only to be nothing like you,

my tongue over the edges of my teeth,

how I sharpen them just now, unnoticed, the way blades

drag across rock without much effort

from the hand that holds them. Know this: on Sunday

there were Blue Nose pit bulls in the yard, and everything

on that red clay earth

was a chew toy: Tonka trucks, teddy bears, pig bone and glass, blood

dried black in the dog food. They paced the same paw path

until the trench was so deep a person could get buried.

Hookmaster and Pete brought me to the barbeque.

A red bone girl licked rib sauce from the corners of her lips.

One-sixteenth Choctaw. The rest: butterscotch dipped in cinnamon.

Pits tied to quarter-inch chains strained against their handlers, pulled back

onto their hind legs. Ears up, the dogs stared each other down,

their barrel chests swollen. I think as they did: tear of tendon, ripped

muscle, snout, neck, and every little moment of life that rises and falls

              in the final pulse.

Tonight I sip my beer, pull my cigarette until my insides fill with fire.

You’re on to children now, or hotel employees, whichever one you blame

for betrayal. That horrible scarf you got for your birthday.

Oh, yes, one more story about your birthday, one more plug

for your published works, your travel, your love of cuisine,

especially from brown people. Any shade will do. I shift my chair

and remember Hookmaster’s reply when I mentioned how tough I felt

being on the wrong side of the tracks. His arms like battleship cannons,

hands that could jerk a rhino by the horn through a gopher hole.

I’ll stay in this chair

until you finish your villanelle about the trials of a writer,

or I could tell you

the weight of a pit bull’s final breath in my arms.

You better hope my chain holds.

Mr. International

On Thursday my fantasies are tall women

with lipstick like blood from a bullet wound

and toenails to match. August

isn’t even a full day old. Just through those branches,

a sky

with the orb weaver in the foreground,

and a notion that I could be

an architect:

stacking rebar, spit, and steel until

curious clouds become territorial.

Every time I see really nice luggage

in an airport I think about the swimming pool

at my apartment complex, the taller women there

burning like solar flares covered in oil.

I bet they like men that stack things.

I bet they go their entire lives staring at buildings

at the blue that backs their angles,

and it never occurs to them to see how fast

an object might fall, or how the body trembles

just before you let it go.

                        ~these two poems originally appeared in the Chattahoochee Review