e Animal

Whatever it was, went fast. Felled wet by one gunshot. e ground listened through its sour mushroom ears. e kill fell spilled and they darkened alive. I hate the world too wild and yet I am here. Everything that makes me up left violently— star and hominid and warring ancestor. Taught to lunge for the throat, throttling breath, body from head, voice from thought still shaping on the tongue.

To end a thing requires steel and every nerve to never stop. at’s the trick of it. To burn the land until every tree is turtlenecked in char, wind carrying out its worst, until the air stinks of something we’ve killed and can’t stop killing. e animal was opened to the sky like a grand piano. Its maggots pumping their oily bellows in hunger. And everyone rubbernecking, a slack weakness the jaw wants to crush. To lure each eye to sleep—that’s the trick— to comfort, and then the god comes down.

Fast I have already forgotten what hurt me. I bow to the new like a cut ower, hangdog. In the way these animals come circling, even after they’ve seen the worst of us— blood plugging up our heads, soaked in what’s theirs. But they forget. Foot before foot to salt and bait, the outstretched hand smells so good. God, that could drive a body.

e promise of hope over cruelty. at what feeds you has already fed. It is what moves foot before foot toward you. Somewhere my end is marked but I will not know it. I will only know this mercy.

So faster and faster I feed, unafraid. And if this is really the ttest of me, what’s fated, what survived of me— forgive me. But look: I do not inch. I eat, believing in this that I am being loved, and ll the eyes of my body until I forget.