Jeramy Dodds

North of lumberless land,

we made the animals fight for us.

Sore warped beasts pinched off

the rag-and-bone rack, ones that

bit by barbed bit were forced to

fisticuffs in the scrub slump of hills.

With a hairline rapture these animals

came and went about our days,

leaving their young to defend

the palaces they were forced from

for us. These carousel mammals walked

skewered to the pole. With forepaws

in kid gloves they pricked ears when

tinder sticks lapped the brass-green

kettledrums, drums that laid down the miles

to their relevant demise.

After rock-picking, the fields

were pocked. My uncle with a hazel switch

kicking his mule’s hide. My uncle

after twenty more one-mores, his

hat-hidden forehead facing hindsight

as he ox-eyed the ten-ton dewline

that girdled the drumlins. His

cat-o’-nine-tailed spine

humped along the timber-slab paths,

his blinkered mule craning at the headlands;

his pelt hides bone anchor points, marrow levers,

sanguine pulleys. An oilcloth dropped

on his doily-thin, God-given name.

And that’s our house, dog-eared

by a balepick hooked in the gatepost

like a tongue licked on winter tin. From

a Caesarean cloudbelly, grey hounds of rain

tear messenger pigeons down to half-tilled fallow.

From the crown of the fox tower I pull my scope

from its rat-hide case, come in close on Uncle,

that mule under his loins scraping home

in ankle drags. The gully was as far as I got

by eye. The rest I only heard,

the noise I’m writing to forget

as the barren hounds got onto him.

It was the year I subscribed to an absurd

amount of magazines, there were lions everywhere.

Lions at the tambourines, lions in the gate house, lions

up the sleeve of your bible black dress, you could set your watch

by the screams, the shimmy-shackle of claws

on the hardwood floor wore down your ears, ghosts

of lions fathered our kids, lions of the long grass,

Barnum & Bailey types, we knelt at the scimitar scar

on the tamer’s breast as valets brought lions upon lions,

lions going at us with the violence of a clearance sale, my wife

comes home with a lion between her legs, antelope musk

hog-tied in her mouth, bed-lamp bright wounds,

a yoke of tear-jars tingling from her nicked shoulders,

lions cornered in her cranium, the wedding dancers slain,

their scattered organs like gobs of fruit, lions

at the chink in our amour, lions on the owls, lions

like labs, the house pets snapped, lions loaded for bear,

lions at the crypt ledger jotting down kills,

plaster casts of claws above our cancer ward doors, lions

past the curtains of our ribs, pant like whistling arrows,

starved lions, hair painted on their bones,

lions in the yard with kids, lions

at the midnight fridge, chicken on their lips,

lions at the watering hole bullying

for beer money, lions mowing through

the Foot Guard, Beefeaters, Dragoons,

standing in perfect pecking order

at my bedside, waiting for me to snap

the bones of my watch onto my wrist and dress

in their gift of slipper-thin armour.

Deer, a jackrabbit the size of a motorcycle.

– Tim Lilburn

Hit quick, the road-wasted stag

fell like the sick sorrel horse

we hunted by syringe

in a 3 x 5 pen. His fallen

figure-skater sprawl

drew out our awe, lying

on his own canvas of blood,

iron tailings from a ran-down mill.

Overcoated men with leather bags

of tinctures and bitters

couldn’t bring him around.

Witnesses stood, arms crossed,

afraid their hands might reach

for the debris of muscle guyropes

knifed by the blunt bumper of an SUV.

Looking aside I saw

a young woman come out

of the woods and work

her way through the crowd,

coming to rest in a kneel

at the buck’s breast.

We moved to halt her

but she heeled us with one hand

while the other slid to his snapped

sapling crown. She rubbed her fingers

gently down his brow, grappling his snout

to bring his half-yard of neck right round.