Sherry Chandler

Dead limbs creak high
in the ash, the west
wind blows in a cold front.
Dry leaves skitter.

I’ve given up the practice of prayer,
god snatched from my lips
by flags in town square
that snap
in this rising wind
like whips.

— from My Will and Testament Is on the Desk

Such a face! It was of a dark, purplish, yellow color, here and there stuck over with large blackish looking squares. Yes, it’s just as I thought, he’s a terrible bedfellow; he’s been in a fight, got dreadfully cut, and here he is, just from the surgeon. But at that moment he chanced to turn his face so towards the light, that I plainly saw they could not be sticking-plasters at all, those black squares on his cheeks. They were stains of some sort or other. At first I knew not what to make of this; but soon an inkling of the truth occurred to me. I remembered a story of a white man- a whaleman too- who, falling among the cannibals, had been tattooed by them. I concluded that this harpooneer, in the course of his distant voyages, must have met with a similar adventure. And what is it, thought I, after all! It’s only his outside; a man can be honest in any sort of skin… Meanwhile, he continued the business of undressing, and at last showed his chest and arms. As I live, these covered parts of him were checkered with the same squares as his face, his back, too, was all over the same dark squares; he seemed to have been in a Thirty Years’ War, and just escaped from it with a sticking-plaster shirt. Still more, his very legs were marked, as a parcel of dark green frogs were running up the trunks of young palms. It was now quite plain that he must be some abominable savage or other shipped aboard of a whaleman in the South Seas, and so landed in this Christian country. I quaked to think of it. A peddler of heads too- perhaps the heads of his own brothers. He might take a fancy to mine- heavens! look at that tomahawk!

…

“Landlord, for God’s sake, Peter Coffin!” shouted I. “Landlord! Watch! Coffin! Angels! save me!”

…

“Don’t be afraid now,” said he, grinning again, “Queequeg here wouldn’t harm a hair of your head.”

— Herman Melville, from Moby Dick