by Lauren Goodwin Slaughter

After the photograph by Dutch artist, Rineke Dijkstra, from her series of portraits of los forcados. In the final event of a Portuguese bullfight, young men known as los forcados use their bodies to exhaust and subdue the bull in a kind of dance called pega de caras.  

It was me or the bull
as it always is. The bull

with his brute-breath
and steam, fear that smells

of a father’s knowing
his smaller son can take him

and will. Offer to bow
to the beast. Offer the dreams

in your skull, the Praia
de Benagil sunlight flaring

through a hole. Time is a boy
I can almost reach—

a kite flown, the blue-tiled floor
of my faraway mother

stampeded with footprints.
I came here for the question

answered by the crowd’s
ovation: a man now, must

I have blood on my face
to be seen.

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Lauren Goodwin Slaughter is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship from Sewanee Writers' Conference, and author of the poetry collection, a lesson in smallness. Her poems have appeared in RHINO (winner of their Founder's Prize), Pleiades, 32 Poems, Kenyon Review Online, Verse Daily, ONE, Sugar House Review, Nashville Review, and Hayden's Ferry Review, among many other places. She is an assistant professor of English at The University of Alabama at Birmingham where she is Editor-in-Chief of NELLE, a literary journal that publishes writing by women. See more at www.laurenslaughter.com.