Killing a Boar in Virginia – Gia Kelliher

October 20, 2023

The sky is orange always orange
Every evening, a new jolt,
Cockroaches filling the slum sink
And a shrouded pile of trapeze limbs.

“I’m a man who hunts villains” says the man
Who sits in the car, the car with bald tires, an engine
That swims in its own mess. This is the horse Verum,
Gorging himself on the battered and bedouin.

He who eats the urchins, carcass black,
The onyx emulsion of time and its frightening reserve of powers
And points his adderhead, masterless, 
to the belly of the smallest, pinkest babe.

Corrugated wire around a vessel called the body,
A vessel called the stomach, a vessel collapsing in on itself, then
Your first denunciation, 
They turn you inside out 

And you’re an all-pink being, dabbled with veins and clots.
You little matryoshka in another through another through a
Little wound on a placid plane of skin
Going gray in the CCTV gloam – this is candor,

Duty, here I go, tumbling past language into submission. And you
Hounded by the anger, the unwavering beacon of righteousness,
Summoning a panel portrait, a champion of justice
Hands worn soft from the beatings, the hands of the launderer,

Bring your bloodsoaked cloths to the vat of lye.
The makesoft, the makekind, the basin of
Sud and steam which is a harbor in the way
A cell is.

A civic investigation into the trench from which you lob your stones,
The pitchfork-torch kind, the unity of a village
Bring your tender heads together men,
Unclip the snaps on your holsters and

Find your guns clogged with soup,
Find a loving husband with filed teeth.
Roomy player primer, the space between the bedroom
The birthing bed and the block.

The tall man at the foot of the iron bedframe 
With a boot on a rabbit carcass, his hands 
Knobby green pears a flail at the knot
Of sisal rope, the fear of a teen in his eyes.

How does one not fall in love with a cruel man
Who turns his blade on the entirety of the world,
Looking back at his progeny a pool of pinkish love
Cow eyes mad at the smell of mince?

I’ll have your daughter, Lieutenant
And call her mija and bugaboo and chicken
And you’ll be a teen forever, the blood between your cuticles
And my heart will turn again to paper.

Beneath a mauled sky, the dawn that
Breaks with vigor and rots by noon.
Ox body you’ll carry
The pudding weight of a sleeping child.