Oyster Boy Review 13  
  Summer 2001
 
 
 
 
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Poetry


American Gargoyle

Charles Fort


After a long winter and disease the doctor located the body of the early New York man a mint three foot gargoyle with sloped head buried in shorts and fedora inside a glacier and he massaged its humpback and gums with clove oil until its eyes flared open. At the horizon and prehistoric shadow he shed his bloated fur and slept for ages before he tossed a gold coin and skeleton key into the five and dime street choir bedpan a gift from the noble man who raised sons and walked barefoot across the equator. He drank a glass of its blue and tainted blood poured salt into its eyes as the gargoyle brayed with spasms on a wooden gurney with its wheels stalled in mud at the river's edge as he burned its genitals and the doctor tossed his knife confident in the elbows he hot-wired to its knees. The man drowned in pre-Columbian bliss determined by his genetic thumbprint found next to the altar that war was good after he crawled on his last dying breath and with his own scorched incisor teeth realized the world, at one time, was flat.