Poem of the Week: Gretchen Primack

Photo by Deborah Degraffenreid

The Dogs and I Walked Our Woods,

and there was a dog, precisely the colors of autumn,

asleep between two trunks by the trail.

But it was a coyote, paws pink

with a clean-through hole in the left,

and a deep hole in the back of the neck,

dragged and placed in the low crotch

of a tree. But it was two coyotes,

the other's hole in the side of the neck,

the other with a dried pool of blood below

the nose, a dried pool below the anus,

the other dragged and placed

in the adjoining low crook, the other's body

a precise mirror of the first. The eyes were closed,

the fur smooth and precisely the colors

of autumn, a little warm to my touch though the bodies

were not. The fur was cells telling themselves

to spin to keep her warm to stand

and hunt and keep. It was a red

autumn leaf on the forest floor, but

it was a blooded brown leaf, and another, because

they dragged the bodies to create a monument

to domination, to the enormous human,

and if I bore a child who suffered to see this,

or if I bore a child who gladdened to see this, or if

I bore a child who kept walking, I could not bear

it, so I will not bear one.

  

-Gretchen Primack   

  

From Kind (Post Traumatic Press, 2012)    

Used by permission.

  

  

Gretchen Primack is the author of two poetry collections, Kind and Doris' Red Spaces, and a chapbook, The Slow Creaking of Planets. Her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Prairie Schooner, The Massachusetts Review, FIELD, Antioch Review, Ploughshares, and other journals. Also an animal advocate, she co-wrote the memoir The Lucky Ones: My Passionate Fight for Farm Animals (Penguin Avery 2012).

 

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