THE ANIMAL EYES GROW DARK

RUNNER-UP FOR THE 2020 PINK POETRY PRIZE

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Because it’s November, harvest done,

I remember my grandfather stabbing

possums with a pitchfork in the silo.

Not that I saw. Not that I can imagine—

the story arrives with the cold each year.

Aberrant and harsh as it is true

so somehow more private—not shared

with friends this evening, wine and music

softening us. One speaks

of that night in college.

When—we fumble here.

Though we’re each smart as a slap,

ellipses strut our sentences.

Rape incapable of dilution by wine.

Grape another adds, when I describe

my first time—blurred edge, gray scene:

we know too well the frayed land

between acquiescence and consent.

Another cork pops, someone lights a cigarette.

A possum speared. Soybeans pink

with blood, my father—whose kindness

is like the ocean, mute and abundant—

watched the last shudder,

the animal eyes grow dark.

~

Facebook couplet my friend receives:

I goggled you I hope that’s not creepy

get a drink with me you’re so pretty!

We brainstorm her reply.

Kind, she suggests, but firm.

We nod, adepts at possum play.

Tail twitch. Held breath.

Lie still, don’t bat an eye.

No one suggests fuck off.

I want to invite my great aunt

to this circle. She’s dead.

My mother purses her secret—

a rape, I think, resulting in her first-born.

Shared I don’t know when or why

for decades hid. No—I know why.

Why we fumble over our own

frail dispatches, violences too slim

to count yet keep adding up.

The men saying smile.

Or, you look good. Or offering

us rides when we walk at night. Or—

My grandfather stood in the blood-dyed grain,

throwing dead possums from the silo.

My father raked the bodies toward the burn pile.

He still hates possums—applauds

their carcasses on the shoulders,

small ferocity I can’t tidy up.

~

A man stalks me a little, showing up

too often at work. I said I had a boyfriend.

My friends add, you could have said you’re gay.

Another cork loosened,

another woman begins that night.

Another, I don’t mean to be a bitch.

In the candle flame, my great aunt

is moth, psychic, seam, her pear-shaped ring

far away on my mother’s hand.

Because it’s November, harvest gone,

my friend writes her kind, firm response.

Possums persist, eating ticks.

We download apps to track us,

releasing frantic beeps to the others

should one not make it home—

from a distance, these women

sound like rose bloom. Someone

suggests we change subjects,

another suggests we go dance—

though men will watch us, their glances

familiar paring knives.

But our glasses fill themselves.

Nothing new is said.

Words pile around us, dresses turned inside out.

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Amie Whittemore is the author of the poetry collection Glass Harvest (Autumn House Press) and the 2020 Poet Laureate of Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Her poems have won multiple awards, including a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize, and her poems and prose have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Nashville Review, Smartish Pace, Pleiades, and elsewhere. She is the Reviews Editor for Southern Indiana Review and teaches English at Middle Tennessee State University.