Nature is indiscriminate. Just this week twenty-
two animals are no longer in danger, they’re
extinct. The ivory-billed woodpecker, a bat,
some river mussels with names like “squash
blossom”, a warbler. One plant. This week
it rained for the first time in 205 days. Imagine
a bird so baffling, so stunning it demands you
call out for God. Imagine a rain so toxic it turns
pools green. In the alley between houses, a den
of coyote have made a home in a drainage ditch
packed with leaves. They eat from the trash
and leave the clean chicken bones on my front
step. One gave birth on a pile of synthetic cob-
webs stolen from a bush decorated for Halloween.
They kill small animals at night. The more this
happens, the less meat I eat. There was a meeting
about how to shoot them, everyone wore masks.
Once, I watched my brother lose his virginity under
a crooked cypress tree. Once I cut my finger and used
real blood to paint the inner thighs of my Barbie.
This was years before I decapitated the possum,
before I stopped the car, retrieved the body
and took it home for mounting. Have you never
killed anything? As kids, my brother and I fought
over the wishbone. He learned how to snap it with
his wrist so I always lost. I collected the remnants
in an orange Tupperware container and carried
it back and forth to school every day of the 1st grade.
That year, I trimmed my hair with dull school scissors,
kept a little box of clippings in a pink paper box
with stapled edges. Eventually my mother caught
me, confiscated it all, never said anything.
–
Kate Sweeney has poems appearing in Northwest Review, Variant Lit, The Shore Poetry, SWWIM, LunchTicket & forthcoming from Muzzle Magazine, & Jet Fuel Review. She has a chapbook, The Oranges Will Still Grow Without Us [Ethel]. Kate is Marketing Director for The Adroit Journal & Word is Bond reading series and resides in Los Angeles.
© 2022, Kate Sweeney
Halfway Down the Stairs 