4 poems
from Edge Beast
Transistor
The ferris wheel races its linchpin
in the distance. Dirty lotuses
spread, half-glowing with the red flare
the town gives off to the night sky
blushing on the marshes. Palm trees stiff
sheathes, shadow-shot. I’m relishing
alone like a song, nighttime my old
sanctuary, having escaped the hotel
full of sleeping.
Figures separate
from tree shadows. A rope glides
over my leg and when the last of it
goes, my head holds a rhythm
of icepicks on ice: two women
led like mares into the hotel.
All around, a kind of mouth, silent
and moist, clamps down. Urine
smell, sound of dragging. My mouth
dries out. A lightbulb ons a room.
I slink against the wall, look inside
this night’s only bright.
Cricket sounds magnify and recede
like a beating. What I see past
the curtain makes my lungs
compress. The women are being led
into the room to a naked man
leaning against the corner
holding a
glass coke bottle
casually. Wind lifts my hair.
The world goes. Still. Now the sound
in my ribcage finds the sounds
in the room. Merges.
With them. I can’t look, can’t can’t.
Fear over my spine, a delicate
sensation, almost pleasant, dandelions
twitching.
A sound is crunching
the gravel. Teeth. I can feel something specific
behind me, a heat. I turn.
A herd of water buffalo
outblacking the night, their hooves
crunch down a slope and into
a pond where they become
weightless.
Muddy lotus leaves
laid thickly over water
I part them with knees hands
trying to get inside
avoid the drop
any sound and the thick growth
muffles my entry.
I’m in it now.
I know something outside is throbbing.
Down there the marsh grass
down there where the water goes dead
like blind beetles
clinging to the bellies of livestock.
Mud meeting my waist
like an old friend,
bullies me under.
I’m trying to escape what
is happening in my head,
the terrible empathy.
What is happening to those women
is not happening to me
and is?
The moon shot through
with lice, that dark thank god
and no stars
just the thick growth
of matted hair over the water
I blend my hair into.
Horns of steel glint
over the black lake which is so quiet
like the arm of an oil spill.
Hides are the warm tarps
that wrap the bones to the bones.
Zanesville Zoo
On the night of October 18, 2011, in Zanesville Ohio, Terry Thompson let loose scores of wild animals which he had been keeping in cages on his farm, then shot himself. Thompson had recently returned from a year in prison on federal weapons charges. When the police were alerted that the animals were running wild, County Sheriff Matt Lutz ordered his officers to shoot the animals. 49 animals were slaughtered. The 6 animals that survived were taken to the Columbus Zoo.
i. bovine
He came across the yellow
bending weeds, swatting, as if
the air bothered him.
Above, ascending bees
with bits of pollen,
sunlight a knife over Ohio. He dipped his hat,
he rarely said more
than necessary. He carried a thick rope
tied around his shoulder blade.
I heard his wife had gone left him—
my pity hands made him a sandwich
which he ate, several yards away
from me, his eyes
on the cows. I showed him the dead one
and the circle of trampled grass
where she'd thrashed. He clicked
his teeth with his tongue as he tied
hooves together, supporting one by one
each bovine leg on his shoulder.
His music was the only sound
and the crunching of grass
from a nearby animal. Said he'd sauté
the 12-inch tongue in onions,
throw everything else
to the lions. His arms and neck: the claw marks
all over him—I pretended not to notice.
His pants black
with old blood, I would have given
a firm washing.
ii. eclipse
Moved to think about the edges of mountains again,
he turns his face where Mars would be
were there no cell to conceal it.
He misses the lion's black mane, that almost-
impossible-to-touch. White scars
felt in the dark, dry rivers he thirsts
over again and again.
His stomach writhes with love
despite how dangerous
to touch them. He wakes a gasping.
Oh how he misses all the pretty little horses,
shying when the wind brought them
tigers' scent. And when the other inmates
sleep, he touches his ink-etched skin,
remembers his wife’s weathered
hands there, her body eclipsing
his. Where was she now—?
Wife in the loose surf, not helpless, but rather,
making a sound that was her sound and impossible
to break into. He had once woken to find her
untangling her hair with her fingers, sleepless, wild-eyed.
Had he wrenched her from the ocean's pit?
That little dry sound at the back of her throat...
A sound, turning in on itself
the way a seagull lifts its wings ever so
to shed what moisture clings.
iii. the bite
When the sheriff saw my shock
and the black bear’s body—a curled fist—,
he said, I gave the order. It’s on me,
as if guilt could be transferred.
He sleeps in one piece, his life lines not stained.
Pretend, as close as I come to mourn...
pleas too late and no one but me and my metal arm.
The bear’s small, almost imperceptible eyes frozen
open. If limestone had ears, if chalk could speak.
White calcite, I’m in a terrific gap, held in stalactite
against a painstaking gush of remorse. My life thrown
into a gallop, a rat’s race. To be a star in frenzy,
revolving in the precise order of a free-for-all.
My mind is still swarming over that grass.
Oh stars, little dogs in the sky, your throng
would floor the song in me, tong, tong,
a metal deadweight sound with
consequences. When I forget, my curse
will level me. My eyes, flashing
backward, will not close again.
When I killed them, I did it on my knees.
Mandy Gutmann-Gonzalez, a poet and novelist from Vilches, Chile, is the author of La Pava (Ediciones Inubicalistas). They hold an MFA in Poetry from Cornell University and their poetry has appeared, or is forthcoming, in West Branch, DIAGRAM, Quarterly West, diode, and other literary journals. They live in Worcester, Massachusetts, and teach creative writing at Clark University. Learn more about their work on their website: mandygutmanngonzalez.com.