Tuesday poem #379 : Amy Parkes : Salt

for HD

Does she kill the old bulls

          with that gun? Great slow animals,

white heavy shoulders.

I’d never seen the whole everything

of a rifle

          so close before. I never asked

why that woman took the corpse

          of our dog. Mutt-mud bloodline,

dust caked into its cracked feet,

          it followed us kids everywhere.

Her rifle made summer

stand still, up to its knees

in the lake and too chicken

to go any farther. Kickback thrash

but her shoulder didn’t move.

She was that kind of woman.

Rode her bulls down the road,

thighs straddled the massive neck.

She had three, one after another;

all perfect, snowy. She would ride

straight into the lake

from the far side. Us on the rocks:

bruised shins, tanned arms, someone

one breath away from a cruelty

to someone else. We had to pour salt

all over ourselves, plucked off leeches

before heading home. Black

threads, alive-and-not. Salt burned

under our nails like snow.

Sun-bleached shallows so cold,

throat fed by North Mountain runoff.

Momma warned us there was no

bottom in the middle, too deep

to mean anything. I liked it best

when it rained. Underwater to my nose

and the sky fell like so many thorns

I was alone that day—

I was the one to catch her.

The bull’s wide head pressed to her

naked chest, her hands stroked its long ears,

must have felt the living

velvet. I know each bull

is just one same wildness

in love with that woman. I think she

hit our dog on purpose, hauling

          a season of potatoes in her ancient truck.

She whispered to Momma. Rifle

sound like the sky got knocked over

         

and cracked clean

in half. Before and after. I watched

her sling the body into the truck-bed.

          We had nothing to bury in dog’s grave.

Just wait,

said Momma. Let me get the salt.

Amy Parkes is a queer Nova Scotia poet living with mental illness. Parkes holds an English BAH from Acadia and a poetry MFA from UNC Greensboro. Her poetry appears in the Bacopa Literary Review and Barrelhouse Magazine, among others. Other poems are forthcoming with the North Carolina Literary Review and Grist Journal, both as prize finalists. Parkes' first piece of creative nonfiction appears in Studies in Canadian Literature.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan