The Dead Eat Everything

Michael Mlekoday

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781612777863
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

"This book is a document of a particular world, real, wrenched from the poet's life, as if written with a gun to his head or a spike through his heart. Reading it is like opening a damp newspaper wrapped around a big fish just caught, fins glistening, scales shining, one rhymed eye open and looking right at you, daring you to eat the whole thing."-Dorianne Laux, author of The Book of Men"The Dead Eat Everything, Michael Mlekoday's furious first collection, is a cypher of old-school curses, elegy, and wordplay that snaps like gunplay. The book begins with a self-portrait when 'summer was one wet weapon after another' and doesn't stop. Not for a power outage, Catholic mass, or sewer steam. Not for a 'four-finger ring that says DOPE.' Not for the city that repeats itself like breakbeats in the head. The poems in this book are as relentless as a Minneapolis winter. And when the speaker says, 'Scientists have proven that the mouth is the last part of the body to die, ' we understand that the mouth hangs on just to speak poems like these."-Adrian Matejka, author of The Big Smoke"It's easy to forget-because of the brute beauty of the language; because of lines like 'I have made gods / of my skinned hands'; because of the whiplash brilliance roped through these poems-that deeply, ultimately, this is a book of mourning, of sorrow, of loss: for a dad, a Baba, a city, a home. But, to boot, Michael Mlekoday's The Dead Eat Everything is a book of magic: watch sorrows be converted to music. And music, don't forget, makes you dance. Makes you move. Moves you."-Ross Gay, author of Bringing the Shovel Down"The Dead Eat Everything is a haunting-an unsharpened visitation of memories. Each poem unfolds itself as if we are just now remembering stories told to us long ago, simultaneously new and exciting while comforting in their familiarity. Mlekoday's debut collection glows. Let it. Let it light the way home."-Sierra DeMulder, author of New Shoes on a Dead Horse

III.

The problem isn’t that you will become dust
but that you ever thought you aren’t already.
—Dean Young

PLAYING DEAD MEANS DIFFERENT THINGS TO DIFFERENT PEOPLE

The dead eat everything. Rain, salted rain,

honeyed photographs kept in closets.

Scientists have proven that the mouth

is the last part of the body to die.

In the ghetto, put your ear to the wettest door

and listen. That’s the jaws dreaming of meat

or metal: the pleasure principle. The sickle,

after all, is an upper lip with ghost teeth:

the black hood obscures the uvula.

Even the dead feel bad about eating veal—

in the background of AM radio,

you can hear them cursing themselves

with whatever language they once swallowed

like mother’s milk, grieving for youth.

When I sleepwalk, I wake up in the kitchen,

the one where my grandmother still rolls dice

at night though we cannot see her.

When I drink, I hide my face in the fridge.

Sitting at my father’s last bed, I licked

every page of the Bible, and the priest

stuffed bread into our mouths,

and the chanting consumed the hospital air.

Driving home, I hit four fresh potholes,

ridged like bite marks in the night.

SELF-PORTRAIT FROM THE OTHER SIDE

The woods behind

my elementary school

held ghosts and gang members.

We studied the carvings in the trees:

GD, Gangster Disciples

or some spirit afraid of GOD.

We weren’t afraid of neither

until we were alone.

My friend carried a gun to school

and we all believed

we were magic. That year

my grandfather died.

That year I found a Pete Rock tape

and twisted my hat backwards

like an exorcism gone wrong.

Not wrong meaning wrong, but.

Not to say I was hard, but.

When I write the letter O,

I imagine it burns through

the paper, that to praise

means to open by force.

The dropped jaw, the bullet hole,

the neighborhood

I can never leave.

FLOOD

The body is a city

of bridges, lift bridges and canals

and collapses waiting like peonies

or plum blossoms to unfold.

Flood.

I come

from the Mississippi

which is to say

I rub against my borders

slowly and fill with filth.

I, river, everything becomes me

and I flush

and flood

with

the thought of it.

To expand, dear body.

To widen like the map

with every voyage,

every cruise and crossing

of hands. Flood.

The musk

of old cabins, dank and moss,

the thrust and arc

of bodies of water.

The violence of desire

tamed only by swerve

and spill. I, river, I,

I, I, I.

My name

floods

away from me.

I raise my feet to the table.

I listen to traffic and rain

and my pulse is both.

SELF-PORTRAIT WITH POWER OUTAGE

Knock down a power line

and it will find whatever ocean

is closest. You are a body of water

and your God is a knifefish,

that nocturnal and electric,

that black ghost and glass. You,

church of emaciation and sleeping pills,

do not let your right hand know

the left is unbuilding you.

Darken, apartment. Surrender

the sweet hum of current,

the light needling itself

under doorways. Listen.

The rain has more than one face.

You discharge, you spill

from yourself unaware,

you are pooling here

like the acoustic dark.

Throw open the curtains.

The rain moves in both directions

and you are a body of water

splaying yourself to the sky.

SELF-PORTRAIT WITH BIG CITY RELIGION

You welcome the collapse of all matter:

gunmetal and mulch, knuckle and rain.

You are one sucker punch away

from the sermon bursting forth

like window shards. The block is heavy

with bodies, with little oceans

of regret and pocketknife prayers.

Only the dead stay underground,

you preach. The world is storming.

You are earthworm, you remember.

Your entire body is mobile, the path

is longer than three hu...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword by Dorianne Laux
• I.
• II.
• III.
• Acknowledgments
• Notes