SWWIM sustains and celebrates women poets by connecting creatives across generations and by curating a living archive of contemporary poetry, while solidifying Miami as a nexus for the literary arts.
His father had taught him to dress it in the field, to whet the blade and core the anus, clip the balls then slit the hide. Run the knife pelvis to breast.
I watched him straddle the split thing, struggle it off the tailgate, so careful of the rack. He was fifteen, sheened with sweat, desire as plain as the strain of each heft. For a truck of his own, a job after school, the impossibly soft hands of a girl.
One year older than me, he seemed a man, his shoulders lit by the street lamps of our cul-de-sac, an October moon rising white beyond the vacant lot.
He said when you cut the windpipe right, the insides slide out with a single pull. Heart and liver, lungs and stomach, everything linked like pearls on a string.
Some boys love death more than anything. Some girls need to look. The buck hung from the rafters, its bent neck so lovely, muzzle white, one chestnut eye staring right at me. My girl-heart caught in the crosshairs.
Emily Ransdell’s work has appeared in Poetry Northwest, Poet Lore, Tar River Poetry, River Styx, and elsewhere. She has been a finalist for the Rattle Poetry Prize and the New Millennium Writings Award, as well as the runner up for New Letters’s Patricia Cleary Poetry Prize. Emily has twice been featured by Ted Kooser in “American Life In Poetry.” She lives in Camas, Washington.
