Charif Shanahan
Eunuch
I.
beyond the village wall his wrists
tied with rope staked into sand his throat
empty his loincloth balled up and pressed
flush against the perineum warm
copper hammered thin and sharp
circles him therehis smoothest flesh
if not early morning it is exactly noon
his eyes roll back into frenzied lids
before the rip into him
and the great wound
covered in sweet wood ash and at last
the long sleep while dogs eat the blood-meat
discarded beside the well
and his waking in air cooled by night
to stand squinting through low fog
at a woman being swallowed by a snake
II.
By day three, waist-deep in clay,
he is ready, if still
breathing, to accept
the hot needle, probing
the lost urethra,
his body then put back
into clay. By month six,
the surface is a gnarl
of skin, discolored,
a quilt of yellow moons:
A shadow of hunger,
as a hand removed
from earth remembers
how it felt to be
submerged,
to enter another warmth
and then to be without—
Charif Shanahan is the author of Into Each Room We Enter Without Knowing (Southern Illinois University Press, 2017), winner of the 2015 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Prize. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous journals, including Apogee, Barrow Street, Boston Review, iO: A Journal of New American Poetry, Literary Hub, The Manhattanville Review, The New Republic, Phantom Books, and Prairie Schooner. His translations from Italian and German have appeared in A Public Space and Circumference, among other publications, and have been performed by the Vienna Art Orchestra. He is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize and twice a semi-finalist for the “Discovery”/Boston Review Poetry Prize. A Cave Canem graduate fellow, he holds degrees from Princeton University, Dartmouth College, and New York University. Formerly Programs Director of the Poetry Society of America, Charif is poetry editor of Psychology Tomorrow Magazine and a Fulbright Senior Scholar to Morocco.
This poem originally appeared in Prairie Schooner (Summer, 2015)