The Belt

Jenny George Click to read more...

George+photoJenny George’s poems have recently appeared in Beloit Poetry Review, Cimarron Review, The Collagist, Crab Orchard Review, FIELD, Inch, and Indiana Review. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fund, the MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo Corporation. Jenny lives in Santa Fe, NM, where she runs a foundation for Buddhist-based social justice. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

 

After she heaved all day against the boards
of her enclosure, after she panted so long
that foam bloomed on her lips, after the sun
sharpened like fumes over the field and then
shadows began to climb out of the earth,
he unbuckled his belt and fed the leather
between her teeth, the big tongue soft
as a sea creature, saying Here
                Bite down girl—

I come to give you something, and the gift
is your own strength, returned to you
as surrender

—and she mouthed hard
and the calf came out like jelly, inert
and cooling on the trampled straw.
It was dusk. High above us, swallows
found their holes in the tower of hay.
A few minutes later, she stood.
Drank a little water from the trough.
His belt where she’d chewed it
was like chewed bread. And what
did you think mercy would look like?

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