United States, (b. 1963)
Cherokee Hogscape
We think of the key, each in his prison
Thinking of the key, each confirms his prison.
— T. S. Eliot
- Pops wd say, these hogs’ll knock you down and chaw yr eyeballs out of the socket.
- Pops collected slops from the poolroom café making you carry plastic buckets – don’t slop yr sneakers
- w\ hamburger scraps, dollops of cream corn, loaf heels or cabbage cores, boy. Tip ’em into that trough as the hogs shoulder like nimble church-goers to a pew, jaws scooping pulp, tensile snouts like chestnut halves, snuffling. When gravy slops your sneaks Pops hollers Peel me a switch! and flexes his arm. You can read switches, calibrate heft to pain, welts testifying tensile swish to bloodied shins or mere blisters.
- You like to choose wood that bled, flexing yr own arm to snap a limb from some mud-spattered de-barked aspen in the hog pen, a bottom barren of grass, leaf or bush.
- Hogpack flanked you, 350 lbs of rippling sides, bristling eyes. You heard ’em snuffling at night through the raw plywood walls of the room off the horse barn where you and Pops under a chenille counterpane in the chill of 4 am pigeons fluttering above yr plywood ceiling, coo-cooing.
- It was in prison, it struck you:
- it wasn’t those hogs you hated but Pop’s chickens. Those scores scratching sawdust with spurred claws sequins pinned for eyes. Not the lash-lined & irised hog-eyes watching as you shit between roots of oak, then waded into the creek to sluice off chicken creosote.
- Prison Mess – not cafeteria, Mess – is the scratch and caw of Pops’ roosters at the feeders. And here you are again, slopping potato goop into troughs.
- They say a cock crowed when you denied our Savior, cockscomb like chawed meat, a skull full of beans.
- But even Jesus knew: chickens gotta doodle-doo.
© Celia Bland. Cherokee Road Kill [illustrations by Kyoko Miyabe]. New York; Rio de Janeiro; Paris: Dr. Cicero Books, Berkeley, CA (2018).
About the Poet:
Celia Bland, United States, (b. 1963), is a poet, writer and educator. She teaches poetry at Bard College, where she is a Writer-in-Residence and the associate director of the Institute of Writing and Thinking.
Madonna Comix, an image and poetry collaboration she created with artist Dianne Kornberg, was exhibited at New York City’s Lesley Heller Gallery, and was published with an introduction by Luc Sante. In addition to her books of poetry, she is the author of young adult biographies of the Native American leaders Pontiac, Osceola, and Peter MacDonald. [DES-12/21]