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05-06-2019
Nickole Brown
Wild Thing
What I knew then was plastic packages
of ramen—instant, four for a dollar,
because with four eggs to match, I’d have myself
four dinners, provided I could keep the gas on
for the month and get that old stove lit
with a match. I also knew what went
at the store for a buck: pinto beans and sliced white,
popcorn, carrots, peas . . . even juice, long as it was
concentrated and frozen in a can.
But what I didn’t yet know was how
that word—buck—got started, back with
my daddy’s daddy’s daddy and on back
down the line, back when for their rheumy knees
men used panther oil brought all the way
up from Florida when panthers still lived
down there, back when men without a dime
to their name could pay land taxes in
skins and piled as many kills they could
on a wagon headed downtown
to sell deer for just that—for one dollar, one
buck, a pop. No, what I knew then were bucks
in my tip jar, how never to start the night empty
but to always put in a few of my own, otherwise
not a soul would think me worth a dollar
and would trash the whole shift
with the rattle of pocket change.
And though I couldn’t have said when deer season
hit, no one had to tell me
about the weather it brought, how cardboard
crammed between wind-rattled panes helped
but barely enough, how under every cover I owned
I’d sleep until the floor stung my feet
awake with cold. Once I got up and turned over
my car, I just might make it to work
on time, but not until I got stuck at a red light
with a man who split his two fingers apart
to make a V for the snake-flick of his fat
tongue, which meant something
about a good time before he gunned
his truck and gave me the full view
of what his flatbed towed—a whitetail
doe, one eye open but somehow more
milk or smoke or dirty dishwater than
eye, her tongue off its hinge, flopping
obscene with every bump down
that road. On my popping speakers, a new
version of that same old song—
now you don’t need that money
when you look like that, do ya honey—
and it was then I knew the bullshit
made up for the endless misery to hit
these woods—all those floods that scrubbed
the babes from their burrows, lifting
their pink writhing to a flotsam of rot, or else
a rage of flames to force natural-born enemies
into those same holes, snakes peaceably
terrified alongside a scorched blister
of mice and frogs, turtles nearly cooked
in their own shells—
and hell if everybody didn’t always say
wild things could care for themselves and always knew
what to do: how to seek higher
ground and survive.
But really, believing that made me
just another fool in this world mistaking
the happiness of looking at a pretty, wild thing
with the happiness that thing feels.
Put another way, I was once young and terribly
pretty and gripped the wheel white, felt the rip
in the vinyl seat rub the part of my leg
raw where my skirt didn’t
cover. I shut off
my radio. In the silence was the talk of men I’d heard
all my life—their bumper-sticker gags
of show me your rack and chasing white
tail—all the old jokes—that buck not dead
but put down for his dirt nap and itching for a mount,
that doe not female but a slickhead, hot and ready
for the rut, all those not shot but taken in peak
season, in sweet, sweet November.
Put another way, I was almost on
empty, and though no one
believed it or cared to see, I was just another
animal, and like all animals
desired, we would suffer.
Self-Portrait as Land Snail
Don’t get me wrong.
I’m a modest girl, couldn’t even strip off
at one of those nudie hot springs out west,
the whole place a flotsam
of much-nursed areolas and buoyant
scrotums while I sat prim
as Gidget, legs crossed and awkwardly
smiling on the shore. It’s just that the snail
is on to something—neither boy nor girl
but both, the critter is nearly mythic—a true
hermaphrodite that all alone
will go to its own kind of cyrobank and baste
itself, make a new batch of not-so-bouncies
in thin, flea-sized shells. But no, that’s not
me. That seems lonely. Better, with another
intersex other it will take
aim, flex back its bow, shoot a dart,
then wait to be impaled
in return. I couldn’t make this shit up
if I tried—this is no metaphor
but scientific fact—a telum amoris—literally,
a weapon of love—a James-Bond-worthy arrow
equipped with four blades spiked
with all the dirty talk a snail
could want. Cupid’s got nothing on this
mollusk congress, and because you know
how snails go, the foreplay is slow—
slow, slow—my kind of sex—
going on and on until the hussy
who first received that dart has enough
and rises to fire back. Now, knowing this,
I can say I didn’t come out
all those years ago, whatever that means. No,
when I finally made a home
for my body in the bed of another
woman, I simply became
a land snail. Tired of being
a leaking receptacle for a man’s
desire, I needed to feel
an equal’s push against my own,
a willingness to be wounded and to
wound, receiving and giving at the same
time. Plainly said, I needed the kind of love
that finally let me take
my time; I needed to fire
an arrow of my damn own.
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 from the concrete floor and
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-had-my-fill-
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.
-All poems appear in To Those Who Were Our First Gods, Rattle, 2018
"Wild Thing" was first published in print by Talking River: A Literary Journal of Lewis-Clark State, "Self-Portrait as Land Snail" was first published in print by The Bellingham Review, andc"The Scat of It" was first published online by Thrush Poetry Journal at http://www.thrushpoetryjournal.com/november-2018-nickole-brown.html
Prompt: As in Nickole Brown's "The Scat of It," write a poem about something...unsavory. Have. Fun. Without fun, there is no poetry.
Bio: 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 first published in 2007 by Red Hen Press and a new edition was reissued by Sibling Rivalry Press in 2018. Her second book, a biography-in-poems 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. Her poems have, among other places, appeared in The New York Times, The Oxford American, Poetry International, Gulf Coast, and The Best American Poetry 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 until she gave up her beloved time in the classroom in hope of writing full time. Currently, she is the Editor for the Marie Alexander Poetry Series and has taught at a number of places, including the Sewanee School of Letters MFA Program, the Great Smokies Writing Program at UNCA, Poets House, the Poetry Center at Smith College, the Palm Beach Poetry Festival, the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, and the Hindman Settlement School. She lives with her wife, poet Jessica Jacobs, in Asheville, North Carolina, where she periodically volunteers at four different animal sanctuaries.