Failed Animals

My first hamster ate its babies
the first night in our house. From the cage
I peeled blue membrane, blubbery—that
was the year of the drowned
child from church, whose parents insisted
open casket to show last & finally

what they’d made. My mother taught him.
My sister, roundfaced, befriended
his great dane. His name is a secret
this poem hides vined up its shirtsleeves & swallows
as a fistful of keys. In the great deaths I’ve known,

there was no hospital, so like bleached barracks for wild cows
a hospital meant milk, meant birth, meant roaming
freedom’s halls & pulling prayers out the chapel lockbox,
stealing nurses’ redbull from a mini-fridge, any evidence
of our going to meata long-tunneled eventuality. I admit

when I think bovine I think that college boy who referred
to the vagina as sack full of cows’ tongues, & how much
we harvest from gentle creatures, bred & slaved—our cruelty
flings itself at the ozone like an old-fashioned movie
killer with plastic cheeks & a butcher knife. They say

no more seals or koalas soon. They say ravenous storms
& less turtles. It’s trying to stop a raze of locusts
with useless tearful fury, then startling at the hungry click
of your own jaw’s hinge. What I could tell you about my people,

my people who turned to honeysuckle
not out of sweetness, but boredom & desire
to dismantle something live that would not yelp.
That seasoned our unblemished legs with the copper
softball pitch. That I was a child, for no reason
glitter-thrilled that strangers identified me
feminine, as a hen must be when held

skirtless by its scaly legs before slaughter.
My people, ethanol perforating brains like hollows in nests.
My people, what are they but smoke & boom & gone.
My grandmother’s house smells arsoned appliances,
my grandfather’s books crushed mollusks between pages.
Some mice cannibalized in the neighbor’s trailer bathtub

up the overlooking hill. That is a lie, those mice
were mine, my sister’s. Two, like us, in their pyrex microcosm
on a corner desk buried by crayons & doll trash. Friends
in their only world, they ate one another & collapsed
in husks of the tiniest bone. It was our fault, our ark
of failed animals. We forgot about them. We had our own bedrooms.

__________

Erin Slaughter is editor and co-founder of The Hunger, and the author of I Will Tell This Story to the Sun Until You Remember That You Are the Sun (New Rivers Press, 2019). Her writing has appeared in Black Warrior Review, Cincinnati Review, The Rumpus, Prairie Schooner, Split Lip Magazine, and elsewhere. Originally from north Texas, she is pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing at Florida State University. You can find her online at erin-slaughter.com.