09-20-2022

 

Nickole Brown​

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A PRAYER TO TALK TO ANIMALS

 

Lord, I ain’t asking to be the Beastmaster

gym-ripped in a jungle loincloth

or a Doctor Dolittle or even the expensive vet

down the street, that stethoscoped redhead,

her diamond ring big as a Cracker Jack toy.

All I want is for you to help me flip

off this lightbox and its scroll of dread, to rip

a tiny tear between this world and that, a slit

in the veil, Lord, one of those old-fashioned peeping

keyholes through which I can press my dumb

lips and speak. If you will, Lord, make me the teeth

hot in the mouth of a raccoon scraping

the junk I scraped from last night’s plates,

make me the blue eye of that young crow cocked to

me—too selfish to even look up from the flash

of my damn phone. Oh, forgive me, Lord,

how human I’ve become, busy clicking

what I like, busy pushing

my cuticles back and back to expose

all ten pale, useless moons. Would you let me

tell your creatures how sorry

I am, let them know exactly

what we’ve done? Am I not an animal

too? If so, Lord, make me one again.

Give me back my dirty claws and blood-warm

horns, braid back those long-

frayed strands of every nerve tingling

with all I thought I had to do today.

Fork my tongue, Lord. There is a sorrow on the air

I taste but cannot name. I want to open

my mouth and know the exact

flavor of what’s to come, I want to open

my mouth and sound a language

that calls all language home.

 

NO ARK

            —for Mary Oliver

 

Ain’t no foxes here, Mary. Ain’t no grasshoppers resting
in my picnic palm. Ain’t too many creatures worth a poem

 

like yours, just mewling strays tucked into the dangerous warmth

beneath a pick-up’s hood, just poodles with painted nails clicking

 

pink—so few animals left to this strip-mall sprawl,
this clocked-in, bottled, florescent-lit existence, even our air

 

conditioned, vents pointing down with a force fierce enough to keep

a bouquet of daisies in full bloom for months.

 

No, no marsh hawks or wild geese neither. Maybe a pet-shop

cockatiel with her dried green sprinkle on carpet of no consequential

 

color, maybe a street robin bopping its dingy breast on the fragile

segments of her legs, maybe a sparrow, like the one who kept pecking

 

my window last spring, fighting who knows what, probably his own

reflection, and because we believe in wives’ tales around here, mama said,

 

Be careful now, death’s trying to get in our home.

 

But then again, once, I did see a moth—he was big, big
as a burger, big as a side of fries, so big he covered the yellow letter P

 

in a home-made sign spray-painted on the asphalt
of the manager’s spot, not No Parking but kept simple: No Park.

 

I was walking—no, Mary, not through the woods
or along any shore—but across the lot of the discount store.

 

But the moth, Mary, the moth—half-dead, electric
green, was unlike anything I’d ever seen. A luna, I was later told,

 

but back then I thought him a myth knocked out of the sky,
a neon messenger sent to tell me that things were once different, once

 

Noah had plenty to gather before the storm, but now, here it was,

plain as day, spelled out for all to see: No ark.

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As in, ain’t no use, not now, not anymore.
Let it rain and rain and rain. Ain’t nothing left to save.

 

And because I’m not you—no, Mary, I couldn’t be if I tried—

he scared the shit out of me—four drowsy eyes eyeing from tattered

 

wings, feathered antenna tasting my hair-sprayed artifice, his limp

thistle legs that stuck to my hands when I carried him to a safer place—

 

well, not safe, exactly, but at least a place where he would be taken
by beak or tooth and not smashed by tires or stomped by some brat’s shoes.

 

But what I want to say to you is this: I was frightened, but I once tried

to save a thing about to die, tried to ease what was to come.

 

And the bag girl, mentally handicapped and happy
just to have her first job, followed me with her rattling train

 

of carts and her bright mouth with not enough teeth
held by too much gum. And when I set the winged thing in the grass

 

behind the dumpster, the girl, she threw that red mouth of hers

wide, laughing and laughing into that long line of empty

 

carts. I tell you, she knew. And I never knew empty carts to be so

damn empty. Never knew how much each resembles a cage.

 

THE SCAT OF IT

 

The shit of it, the slick of it, the beetle’s tumbling joy,

the bear’s berry slush of it, the coyote’s ghost white

dry of it—undigested fur, nothing more, hot-pressed into a

turd—that nothing-wasted prayer. The shame

 

of it, even the dog shy, peering from behind a bush,

spine curved into the not-in-my-yard-sign; the teasing too,

me laughing about the anal express, the poor cat hissing

at the vet’s gloved hand. The dump and log

 

slop of it, a sad jaundiced yellow or something rich, a deposit

of iron, green nearly black, the color of a forest

never once cut, miraculously untouched.

 

Then too there’s the zoo—regular factories

of it: the chimp’s sling of it against his bars, and not too far

from him, swaying ceaselessly from side to side—the elephant—

how hers is shoveled up, scraped from the concrete floor

then hosed down, the rest of the heft hauled away. Down the road

 

it’s sweet meat for the pumpkin patch and hungry rows

of corn. And further on, in the dark of the barn, the halo of it

glows white around a chicken’s diddle warming next to her eggs.

The hen broods in, pays no mind to the much more tidy loo

 

kept by those few lucky pigs allowed to stand

and walk away from their bed to defecate outside, so different

from the lift-your-tail-and-go-where-you-stand kind—

that of the goat and sheep and rabbit—each pellet perfectly round,

a pile of dinky moons eclipsed, a mess of shining beads, a black rosary

 

undone, the prey animal take on it—look both ways and shit

quick, no dallying around.

 

The rice-sized mouse of it in the kitchen drawer, even smaller

is that of the roach, the cabinet scrubbed raw because mama says

such leavings are degrading, meant for the dirty and poor. In the water,

 

an ocean frolics with it, the seahorse trails it from a hole close to where

his babies burst from his chest—watch it frolic like a yellow streamer

before it breaks loose and floats. And up the river

 

the salmon rid themselves of what’s left of it, and with their load

lightened, eat no more. The satisfaction of it—the full-belly, the I-did-my-job-

 

now-let-go, as in what the earth has given my cells have loved

to death and now give back what’s left, a cramp of thank you,

here is my offering, a stench maybe for us but for everything else

 

a bouquet of gratitude, a scattering that if you look close you can

track, at least until it’s finally buried again, whipping with

worms, churned in, folded back. There is no shame

 

in it, and if we are disgusted, we have not yet

learned—blessed is that from what we came, blessed

to what we return.

 

-from To Those Who Were Our First Gods (Rattle, 2018), selected by Fall 2022 Guest Editor, Michael Walsh 

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Nickole Brown received her MFA from the Vermont College, studied literature at Oxford University, and was the editorial assistant for the late Hunter S. Thompson. She worked at Sarabande Books for ten years. Her first collection, Sister, a novel-in-poems, was published in 2007 with a new edition reissued in 2018. Her second book, a biography-in-poems about her grandmother called Fanny Says, came out from BOA Editions in 2015 and won the Weatherford Award for Appalachian Poetry. The audio book of that collection came out in 2017. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Kentucky Foundation for Women, and the Kentucky Arts Council. She was an Assistant Professor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock for four years and was the co-editor of the Marie Alexander Poetry Series for ten. Currently, she teaches periodically at a number of places, including the Sewanee School of Letters MFA Program, the Great Smokies Writing Program at UNCA, and the Hindman Settlement School. She lives with her wife, poet Jessica Jacobs, in Asheville where she periodically volunteers at a three different animal sanctuaries. Since 2016, she’s been writing about these animals, resisting the kind of pastorals that made her (and many of the working-class folks from the Kentucky that raised her) feel shut out of nature and the writing about it. Her work speaks in a Southern-trash-talking way about nature beautiful, damaged, dangerous, and in desperate need of saving. To Those Who Were Our First Gods, a chapbook of these first nine poems, won the 2018 Rattle Prize, and her essay-in-poems, The Donkey Elegies, was published by Sibling Rivalry Press in 2020. In 2021, Spruce Books of Penguin Random House published Write It! 100 Poetry Prompts to Inspire, a book she co-authored with her wife Jessica Jacobs, and they regularly teach generative writing sessions together as part of their SunJune Literary Collaborative. A list of Brown's upcoming readings and teaching engagements can be found here: https://nickolebrown.com/calendar.