Sow [Graduate ODU Poetry Prize Winner]
By Michael Alessi
- It’s not the fists of steam that roll from the body
- when the sow strung up on gambrels spills open.
- It’s not her father stepping inside to cut away
- what will be chitlins, the skin
- folding over his shoulders like two wings.
- It’s not the buckets of blood
- her twin nephews lug to the barn
- and pour into an earthen trough.
- It’s not the black mantle of hair
- that bobs on the surface of the scalding pan,
- or the hook her uncle stirs the body with.
- It’s not the way the zinc can lids
- melt and curl from the heat
- as the last dark hairs are scraped.
- It’s not the sight of her brother leading
- the animal to the clearing by a rope,
- but that it lifts its head to sniff the pistol
- at the pierce of the whistle
- he has used to call her before.
*
Michael Alessi’s work has appeared in New Delta Review, where he won the 2013 Ryan R. Gibbs Short Fiction Contest, and is forthcoming in Nano Fiction and Mid-American Review. He lives in Chicago. Email him at michaelalessi87@gmail.com