Featured Poet #19

POETRY:



Bestiary

There are strange goings on tonight. Televisions walk in and out the door. Pills spew from the cat’s mouth here take your medicine. A fox at the door yip yips pit bull chews a piece of Wonderbread the skull of a boar on the table. Boy reaches through a hole in his bathroom floor. The door is open. The window is open. The toilet seat is up. The medicine cabinet is open. The shower curtain is open. Foxes in the basement yip yip yip a terrible sound worse than coyotes worse than the school bus tipped on its side. She rests on the floor listening a chirp a whistle pills everywhere. Perhaps she murdered her husband and buried him beneath the floor under the patch of carpet the darker patch the new patch the patch she rubs with her hand. Steam rolls under the house. Light beams shoot from the eyes of the stuffed pheasant from her palms the school bus tipped on its side. Nothing comes from the sky. A pregnant fifteen year old stands in a child’s wading pool stroking her great belly. Her younger brother lolls on the grass. There is joy in the garbage dump the stuffed fox on alert tail quivering. There are strange goings on tonight. Light and steam roll from the holes in the floor the school bus tipped on its side the ravaged garden. I can fix this. I can fix this.


Goose Girl

Snapped him wide open,
spine in her teeth,
three drops of blood, flutter,
a series of shocks.

She was late, too late for him,
an enchantment, his secret.

He forgot what it was like to stand
in the forest and bleed, pressed,
tied, silenced but for the false
dark with mink eyelashes.

There was the lesson of compliance.
There was the animal’s head encased in plastic—
sooner or later the gas had to find a way.

There was no letting up once she started peeling
the skin off her heel, shed her entire, a little hissing
fit, don’t call it, don’t call it fit.

A criminologist discovered the truth
by the stains on her dress, pink skin
underneath and the bees
gathered on her toes.



Bio: Rebecca Loudon

Rebecca Loudon lives and writes in Seattle. She is author of Tarantella and Radish King (Ravennna Press), and Navigate, Amelia Earhart’s Letters Home (No Tell Books). Her latest collection, Cadaver Dogs, is forthcoming from No Tell Books. She has work forthcoming in Pistola, Copper Nickel, Lungfull!, and No Tell Motel.



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