Deer Carcass, Mifflinburg

Listen to GC Waldrep read the poem:

Haruspexy at field’s edge.

The unwritten soul
stitches it into the fringe
of its garment,
I mean the image of it.

We are told nothing, really.

It’s a world
sweeping the bride
from the hospital tiles.
A snowstorm’s on its way.

The field, vs.
the known planets
& the hospitals they succor.

At the margins
of the statutory season
of ancestral suffering,
a gun is a sort of laboratory.

But so is the eye
of the bride, even in sleep.

I stir the entrails
with a stick,
a bit of deadfall maple.

Small bees rise
even in winter, they taste
the disturbance, they’re curious
in their social way.

Twilight pier
stretching into revelation
that is my father’s
dying body, far from here,

from the halogen-lit
hospital, from the blurred
field, its spiky albumen.

The ash I bear in me,
its furrows ever-deepening.

The bees, returned
now to the relative warmth
of the cast-aside
body, the collapsed 
tent of flesh
some hunter eschewed:

the pelt, worked
into a braid by a scrim
of ice. The snug penetralia.
The glazed eye.

It’s not fate, the tongue
you bear inside your mouth,
although often
it’s just as painful.

I am a medic
at the site of some accident:
I have trained in every art
except this one.

I pull my passport
from my vest pocket,
but somehow
there are two of them, &
I don’t know which one to use.

Both of them
the kind nurse clarifies,
& it seems she’s
right, they let me through.

Read more from Issue 22.2.