Jarred Thompson
Poaching
After the storm, you came in with your bloody hands
carcasses hanging from your fingers.
You killed so lovingly, it impressed me.
When I spied the cardiac muscle between your teeth
or the eye jelly in your pocket, the fingernails, the necklace of ears round your neck
I never thought they were warnings but gifts you laid at my feet.
We killed so gleefully together, splashing guts all over the place.
Now the blood won’t wash off the walls,
off hands, off faces.
Now the stench is unpalatable
I gag every time I try to breathe.
Desensitized to the heads you hang on every wall,
the trinkets you leave in my jacket pockets.
I begin to wonder when your knack for poaching men
will turn toward and devour me.
Jarred Thompson‘s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Typecast Literary Magazine, Type House Literary Magazine, Outcast Magazine, the Esthetic Apostle, Sky Island Journal, Cosmographia Books, Best New African Poets Anthology of 2016, and New Contrast Literary Journal. His chapbook Universes and Paradoxes was shortlisted for the Kingdom in the Wild Poetry Prize. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Typecast Literary Magazine, New Contrast Literary Journal (forthcoming 2018), The Rainy Day Literary Magazine, ImageOutWrite, the Johannesburg Review of Books and Transcending the Flame: The Writivism Mentoring Anthology (Black Letter Media, 2018).
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