Flames For Early Dinner Poem by Felix Bongjoh

(i)

Hot shots of sun settled
on our dishes
like flashes from a steady flame,

as we sliced and tore
and sawed off chunks
of steak and fluffy flesh off chops.

Their spread-out bones sat
in plates and bowls
like broken pieces of rock

on a mighty mountain
of a meal we had to scale up.

(ii)

My neighbor to the right,
who'd crushed his lamb
chops leaving whole sticks of bones

also piled hills of chards
from broken and crushed bones
and pebbles from lumps

of chewed chicken tibia
and marshy fibula. They rose
like small thin stems swinging

leaves of tissue paper,
as dijon clavicles and pygostyles
winced and talked softly

under forks prodding
the tuscan sun meal
from every angle and height

in rolling blazes of fire
from red and yellow lilies burning
from a sprayed table cloth.

(iii)

The littered flowery napkins
and gold sauce pans floated over
laid-out ribbons
above a butterscotch décor.

The television screen
hanging over heads also poured
gaudy images of fire

coloring a village with flames,
as they oozed
from hearths of flaxen debris
still spreading out
chewed and crushed

pieces of sheets flowering
with cinder and ashes
that bloated trunks of melted jewelry
still flashing out shiny petals.

(iv)

The TV commentator aroused
even more flames
from hanging small watery dots

beneath eyelashes
scalding sunken flesh on cheeks

by shooting arrows
with needle- and razor-tipped words
at a fire of war
from a stretching screeching screen

that had already devoured all of us
with a crow night in broad daylight.