Shares samples or interpolations of Black Sheep, Betty Davis, Aretha
Franklin, and Sly & the Family Stone, with shouts out to Heat Rocks
Podcast
He would taste of forlorn.
The kind he thought he left behind, present and fermented.
The boy is no injured tiger, no rogue elephant crashing through the trees
without the concept of punishment. A jackal is a jackal. How could I understand
this abandoned hunger. One step is all he had to take
backwards. I sing the lullaby my children howl without,
and remember all the meals
his missing thumb provided them. A thumb
for sending claws in flight,
with feathers to bring down
feathers—to bring down grazing,
hunting, domesticating,
weeping beast alike.
The feathered ghosts who nudge–
guided his arrows, flown elsewhere. To become
a scavenger, your tongue
must gain a flavour for the fever
panic puts in blood, the bitter of acquiescence. A jackal can still love
to savour reverie lingered on in flesh—
stopped amid itself so clean the taste of dying can’t replace the pull
by river quench or mating calls at dawn. Mm, the way he waits,
as if for my deliverance, I could dine on this
for weeks, this feeling, my teeth welcomed
as poultice. I might just kill him because his scent
escapes naked from his sleep, tiptoes roots to where I lurk,
nuzzles up, implores. It would be easy.
No fire holds me at baying distance. Easy, and, so little is.
The air feels caked with caterwaul, no rawhide
shawl to wrap it. My teeth as poultice. What says more?
He turns to bare his neck, perhaps because a nightmare,
perhaps because I casually approach upwind. My nose picks out
the ripple of his fingers’ decimation. Out of reach: the goal beyond
this daily thing he did. This archer’s craft: all he had to lose.
It’s only everything. I want to tell him
his hunt endears me. Like a restless litter
suckled back to daydream. What is is only everything,
what was will be again. The guru venerates
supplication, I when he’s on feet. One step,
not enough. I hear in my own growl—
Avow this, with your body, learn again to nourish my kin
through the coming drought. More arrows,
less famine. One step more. Stand!
With and against death. I wonder if this hunter can
believe what a jackal knows. I sing the lullaby
my children howl without.