The Poacher and Brothers

Ian Haight

The Poacher   Out across the frozen pond, running to the first field, I punch through the ground’s ice-surfaced snow.   Dean bends over, throwing up,              “You wanna       go back?”                     “No,     it’s cool   man,” he says, laughing running under the full moon.   Crossing into lower fields red light flashes through the trees of a field ahead                    a woman screams   Pretending not to hear or see, we don’t speak. Am I hallucinating?   Three more screams and I run, ready to kill with my kung fu to be a hero to a sexual object girl-- the screams, fast, squealing high; echoing like a slaughterhouse      red light slashes through the trees     A jeep stands parked on the road     red light screams           pans the square snow surface of field scrub.           “Hey man, what’re you doing?”   red light out   carrying his rifle he comes.         “I said                  what’re you     doing?”   Throwing a megaphone into the jeep he looks at us holding the gun.                   “It’s silver fox season.                  Their pelts                  are pretty expensive.                    I was hunting them.”   Gun in the jeep headlights out he speeds away kicking gravel at my blue jeans.                    “That fucker was poaching             turkeys.                 No way      would a fox come to those calls.”     On our deck back home                        “Did you know                            turkey beards       can get ten feet long?”                Dean says, exhaling smoke into the night’s cloudless sky.

Brothers        After a day’s play at dusk, we once climbed the doghouse        roof.  I pushed, he pushed,    and each push went touching        into him or me, each warm hand or tongued cry shaped a new king        of space, as if by looking in    each other’s eyes on that creaking        world not made for us, we felt more than meeting each other--we breathed        bigger than those acres    of wooded hills behind the house,        bigger than the booming furnace vent ghost, or our cat,        shot near the corn    rows, and we found we could live.

 

Ian Haight has been awarded translation grants from the Daesan Foundation and Korea Literary Translation Institute.  His poems were awarded the John Woods Scholarship, and were selected as finalists for the Pavel Strut and SLS fellowships.  Recent writing appears in Runes, Barrow Street, and Quarterly West.

Photo courtesy of dreamstime.

 

 

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Poems Copyright © 2007 Ian Haight. All rights reserved.