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andrew mcfadyen-ketchum

Andrew 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."

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
Ad Hominem Art and Literature Review 2010.
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