It was a place where figs grew ears
like old men—oversized and whiskered,
where the buck my uncles shot hung skinless,
back hoofs hooked to the porch rafters,
his outstretched tongue a dark spigot for the blood-drain,
a place where every shed and tractor tire
palmed a sleeping snake,
where my life was as shallow
as the beam of a flashlight—
          and it was all batteries, batteries
that lit up my yellow marrow in the yard,
where dreams of orange extension cords
uncoiled to pull their long necessary bodies
through the scrub,
                             the ashy sinisa,
                                                      the pipes,
where toothed cables surfaced slick
from sinks and toilets—every appliance
growing mucous and mutinous in the night,
coiling round the chest of my stiff cot
like a grounded quail, just injured.
It was a rough grotto beneath
the sycophantic sweet-heat of fig tree
                                                         where I listened
to the progress of the day's wide, wet mouth
lapping at its night wounds, where the yard darkened
with the smell of frying venison
                             and the batteries, the batteries
and all the bloody gullet
of couched uncles swallowing suddenly up
from bourbon naps and billiards, their sunburned
chests bellowing for all the world where are you
                 and who will fetch a switch?

KARYNA McGLYNN is originally from Austin, TX. Her poems have recently appeared in Rosebud, Cimarron Review, Blackbird, Good Foot, Wisconsin Review, Connecticut Review, Hotel Amerika and Verse. A three-time Pushcart nominee, Karyna is the recipient of the Cornwell Fellowship in Poetry and the Michael R. Gutterman Award for Poetry at the University of Michigan where she is currently pursuing her MFA.




 

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 Karyna

 McGlynn