Jason Boitnott
Bagging Leaves
Orange trash bags smirk their gap-toothed jack-o-lantern smiles,
their eyes shadowy in printed black when stretched to distortion
by the tug of a disinterested teenage girl hastily stuffing
colorful, spade-patterned blankets of leaves inside.
In her rush to complete her Saturday morning chore,
she impales one of the bloated pumpkins, running
a dull stick like a wooden spear through his side, splitting
his ribcage and spilling his fleshy tissue onto the sidewalk.
Throughout the whole ordeal — even when his guts need pushed
back in (quickly misguided and jammed into the soft spot of his skull)
and his wound needs sewn twisty-tie tight — he continues to grin
like a teenage boy aroused by the incidental touch of her hand.
Bio
Jason Boitnott is a lifelong rural Nebraskan, family man, twenty-eight-year educator (high school counselor), and livestock farmer. His poems can be found in recent or upcoming issues of Comstock Review, The Midwest Review, Last Leaves Magazine, The Closed Eye Open, Wingless Dreamer, and Nebraska Poetry Society's Poetry Rabble.