CGP15: Gingerbread
by Geof Huth (12 pp. Sewn Binding.) $7 ppd.






Begun in the excess of the 80’s, finished in 2008 at the gate of our present grief, Geof Huth’s fable of annihilation, Gingerbread, offers a cautionary tale for an age smothered by its own girth. Tumescent with sweet words, Huth’s nightmare of dreamy hovels rotten at the core thrusts its stake true to the right eye of our age of overcompensated executives and shriveled mortgages.


From Gingerbread
by Geof Huth


That night, they slept there beside their father,
dreaming of him (who was there), what he taught
how to bring down one tree through the forest, 
without tearing down another needing
to grow; how to rip the skin from a boar; 
to sing; how to make words like painted stones,
to say that “Even the white right-wrought root
wrought rot” and believe it because all things
fail, and dreaming of their stepmother, not
there (always in purple paisley, a scarf
red with lamb’s blood, her clogs of spalted wood
and toad leather, a shawl of worn boar’s hair,
a ring carved from fired bone, five earrings 
from the tears of turquoise swans, and, around
her lizard’s neck, dropsical, heavy, hung
a burlap asafetida bag full
with rosehip, licorice, marshmallow root,
lemonbalm, mint, and horehound powdered fine
and sifting through fibers with her every
movement: walking or her forearm shifting,
her spasmous body quivering awry,
a cough), and dreaming of the snow drizzling
down onto their quiet bodies, snowflakes
melting on their open skin or slowly
covering . . . .
      
                        Awake.