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andrew mcfadyen-ketchumAndrew McFadyen-Ketchum has recent or forthcoming poems, interviews, and reviews in The Missouri Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, Sou’wester, The Spoon River Poetry Review, Copper Nickel, Rattle, Glimmer Train, Third Coast, The Southern Indiana Review, CENTER, Grist, Cold Mountain Review, The Cortland Review, and The Crab Orchard Review, among others. He received his MFA in Poetry from Southern Illinois University Carbondale and currently lives in Los Angeles where he is a Professor of English at Pepperdine University and teaches workshops out of his home with LAWritersGroup.com. He is also Founder and Editor of www.PoemoftheWeek.org.
Click here to read about the poet's inspiration for the poem "Deer Ticks." |
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Deer Ticks
Never before had they seen a man pee, Judy’s pugs who clamored for real estate between my legs as I— the student commissioned to fell the young poplars that thrashed and threatened to smash the hovel of cordwood and mortar she erected by hand by wheelbarrow by chainsaw on the outskirts of the Shawnee National Forrest— I anointed them, one by one, those spraddle- legged canines of constantly bulging and blinking eye-- and they were saved, quivering and desperate as they peered into the work-and-Lone Star Beer-made-golden stream that issued forth from my body-- and they were forgiven, those stubby brutes, of all their unnumerable doggy sins— I their holy man, their St. Francis of Assisi, perhaps, or some other sort of lowercase god lording o’er his flock and zipping up his work jeans with a grunt of satisfaction and returning to the fire circle where (now saintly, now nimbused, now holy) I helped pick ticks from the blood-lovely flesh of the haunches, of the inner ear, of the tear duct of the eye and flicked them, one by one, into a pail of rainwater where they were to drown as I explained in my half-lit lilt to Judy that her pugs were forgiven, that her countless Canis familiaris had finally found salvation, which is how we came to be speaking of Samson who Judy believed must be damned despite his brief endowment of the hands of God, which is how I came to declare my own belief that it’s every man’s God given right to take his own life, which is how Judy came to turn to me in the dark (gray hair made silver by the backlight of fire) and ask but what about women? and all night dream I kept waking from and falling back into (what with the wind whipping the trees into such frenzy and the pugs who squeezed past the door hunchbacked in its frame to bawl at the barrenness that the world floats through at night) until well past sunrise when I no longer could stand the incendiary sleeve of my mummy bag and rose to return to the wide oval of stones and there, crawling derelict from the pit of still-warm ashes I’d made the night before with the pale of water: the ticks we thought we’d drowned emerging one by one from the soft powder of cinders, dazed as they stumbled up the shallow gradient all in a line like pilgrims or supplicants or mourners-- some of them horribly burned, some untouched, a mute song rising from the earth as they retreated into the woods from which they’d come, and I, I let them. -for Mary Interlandi 1983-2003 |
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