What Rough Beast | 06 25 20 | Koss

Koss
Write / Like Them / Deer Editor (Whose Poetry)

Dead deer poems

Dead deer poems

Dead deer poems

skinning / what white guys do
poetics of slaughter
some call it redneck
or writable rite of passage / manhoody stuff

poetry fodder / banal glory / hole
man hole / man cover / holy hole / white mite
straight narrow arrow / white schooled boys
write right / white write / write white

And furthermore:

dogwood

magnolia

wisteria whispered in breathy metaphor (think Marilyn Monroe)
winnowing across a creamy / linen / fat / edition
Whitman-coopted / a likable queer / worthy of eating
all dead now / all harmless / all whitely-bearded / disappeared

nature or nurture / how did “we”
get to this place / or you / me-them
this place of writing / of skinning / of publish /
of material-thin / of privilege / of ownership /
of word-other worldness / tradition

think / nothing much to write home about
or poems / “don’t be so serious,”
said the white-faced joker to the native girl
and the black wiry girl
and the thin queer boy
and all who didn’t “fit” in
and all of those lovely poet heads with their mouths full
of stories lolling along macadam highway shoulders
as the fast sleek cars full of exquisite bourgeois language slashed by
speeding towards their glory
to the colossal listening
those who gobble their mirrors

let me just say this / let the dead deer sleep
without affected elegies
you ate them after all
there is no redemption in your pen

people without mouths or tongues are dying everywhere

—Submitted on 06/25/2020

Koss, a writer and visual artist, holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work has appeared in Cincinnati Review, Hobart, Spillway, Exquisite Corpse, Diode Poetry, and other journals. Twitter @Koss51209969 and Instagram @koss_singular.

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