David M. Buhajla is a writer and poet living in the Arkansas Ozarks with his wife Marci and his daughter Maya. He teaches English at Arkansas Tech University. His work is currently available in Counterexample Poetics, Sex and Murder, and Danse Macabre.
David M. Buhajla
Perspective
My hand is raised to
the sky and I look
at the beam of sunlight
that shines through
the bullet hole in my palm.
The hole stares at me, a red-rimmed
eye.
I look up at the man
in the black uniform. He asks
if I am a Christian.
The word for God in my
mother’s tongue
is Isten. He is a pagan god.
We were monotheistic
before the Christians came.
“It’s all a matter of perspective,”
I say before he pulls the trigger.
Rituals
1.
I stand on a street corner
and watch as a man with
Willie Nelson braids invokes
Armageddon. His eyes blaze
with holy fire in the night before he
melts into a pool of abstraction.
2.
I sit on a bed in Mexico
as cockroaches crawl
and whisper on the walls. I hear
them grumble praise to Mithra
in their mini-Masonic ritual
and song. In a dank cave below me,
she smiles and caresses the rock
with her breasts.
3.
The old woman walks in circles,
singing the same three notes over
and over in an octogenarian chant.
Her socks are stained with months
of sweat as she babbles
in three languages.
4.
The young and passionate
doctor cuts along his hairline,
peels off his scalp, and begins
to chew on it as the virus
he just created feeds on
the part of his brain that
controls self-preservation.
5.
The boy under the Superman
blanket twitches, eyes open,
trapped in a cage of sleep
paralysis as the shadowed
silhouette stands over the bed.
Outside, the crackle of gunshots
echo across the neighborhood.
6.
Across the Atlantic, the priest
sees sound and hears light as he
puts the gun to his temple. The crucifix
in his room falls off of the wall
and stands on end, glowing with zeal.
