D'Alzon Library Events
A Poetry Reading by Rebecca Morgan Frank
Friday, March 16 at 7pm
Rebecca Morgan Frank is the author of Little Murders Everywhere (Salmon Poetry 2012), and her poems have appeared in such places as Ploughshares, The Georgia Review, Guernica, Prairie Schooner, Post Road, and Best New Poets 2008. She has been awarded the Poetry Society of America's 2010 Alice Fay di Castagnola award for a manuscript-in-progress and an AWP Intro Award, as well as fellowships from the Virginia Center for Creative Arts and the Writers' Room of Boston. She is co-founder and editor of the online literary magazine Memorious.org.
LITTLE MURDERS EVERYWHERE
As for me, I was merely an accessory:
I raised the ax and chopped the frozen squirrel in thirds.
The red-tailed hawk watched me
marble-eyed,
our fear strung as taut as the line that joined us.
When I offered her the unwanted –
tiny beaks, spindly legs (male chicks from the factory)–
she came to me, swallowed them whole, left
not a trace of yellow in my covered palm.
Our rope never loosening the length between us.
I tried to please her, found corpses everywhere,
scraped them from the pavement, then
transported, froze, and butchered them.
Small birds, two chipmunks,
a pregnant field mouse. A rattlesnake.
Dark-blood bodies, casualties I didn't mourn.
I loved only her, her snapping severed wing,
that vicious grip, her equivalent of a fist.
And what could she think of me?
I was the dark room, the leather glove, the rope.
This poem first appeared in Sou'Wester in Spring 2007.
