Elegy for Samuel
by Nicholas Ripatrazone
His teeth were corn, his gums were salted meat. The hair on his forearms bunched in furred clusters. His laugh was long, absolute, and released a healthy amount of spit. He had sex eleven times between the years of 1943 and 1947. He ate salted peanuts after laying brick. He never washed his hands before eating. The interior of his bottom lip had been chewed since childhood and remained scabbed. He hated his cousins from Snyder County because they had blond hair and brown eyes. He had observed an oscillating disc above his home in 1948 and contacted the local authorities, who in turn contacted Project Blue Book, and two officers questioned him at length about the disc, his employment, his dislike of family members, his opinion of communal land ownership and the distribution of wealth, and the frequency of his sexual relations.