Sandra Meek
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Kill

        South Africa, 2008, leaving Kruger




June’s winter, ivory-rinsed blue,

a wild dog tugs a sock of skin
down an impala’s stick-leg penciling skyward

one gray hoof--

What makes them kneel
is their need

for leverage, paws tucked
in the torso’s broken bowl as they strip 

the steaming meat, emptying the splayed body
to a thin ghost

of steam, to hide-sack and jutting leg bones, deflated
bagpipes, a sprawled

marionette--

                        Xenophobia was again
the radio word of the day, people still burning 

on both sides of the border. After death
by fire, the limbs 

will not be straightened, whether the feet
were or were not

hacked off, whether the arms received
short sleeves or long, severed at elbow,

or wrist--

                            Sanctuary is a landscape
of smoke and thorns; shelter, what can be seared

around you. Sated, the dogs turned
to play, chasing

each other through thornbush, one

collapsing to sleep, his fur a patchwork
of smoky topaz, ebony, day-old snow blurring

into yellow grass and gray sand, his face
blush-stained from the impala now a tilted

horn lyre, a bloody basket
of unraveling ribs.

Mid-hunt, the pack was a shifting

precarious galaxy, harlequin’s motley
mapping each dog’s back a sui generis constellation

of fawn continents
and black sea, white ice caps, the impala herd a tawny

undulating river, the dogs’ royal
fly-whisk tails brilliant

white plumes not to lose
the us and the them in all that coppery

adrenal flow. The human body always curls

away from flame, from the hand
that tosses it

into thatched roof or cardboard walls
ignited with the last

caught words of this world--Refugees, traitors, imperialist
stooges--

           A week driving, I was still forgetting
stay left, still mistaking for blinkers

the windscreen wipers’ wand. The dogs
far behind, when I pulled back

onto the highway I caught myself
turning my head

as for a distant country, straining
to search the one direction

no one any longer would be coming.



First published by Guernica: A Magazine of Art and Politics, January 2011.
An audio file of my reading "Kill" is available on the Guernica web page, at
http://www.guernicamag.com/poetry/2225/meek_1_1_11/


For photo gallery of wild dogs after kill, Kruger National Park, South Africa, click here:

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