2024 Online Poetry Contest Finalist: Ode to Finales
By Kiersten Czuwala
After dinner, my boyfriend tells me that I should learn to slaughter
my own meat. That actually, farmers have pinpointed down to the angle
exactly how to position a barrel against a cow’s skull
to flood the hollow of the bullet hole
with serotonin. Why are you crying?
he says. Isn’t that beautiful? & I think all dreams are
until morning comes to prove the existence of something more real
than night. & that in every small lie is a truth
that does not wish to see the light shed over its sheer-boned back–
that most cattle sent to slaughter are stunned through a process
which often does not render them fully unconscious as intended.
That like me, they curse the poem for writing a death they refuse
to finalize. Forgive me for the game tonight, the way I ganged up
on your pieces like that in the end. Let me tell you what I know about winning,
how to reject the gambit & harbor the fugitives in the vacancy
of a white blank page. Here the poem begins with a pawn
wrestling the muscle of a bishop between its legs
& so it begins repenting violence
to the one who put me on my knees.
I kick a keyhole through the sky & the poem stares down
& I won’t say it wasn’t hot, getting pinned by whatever god
loved me enough to pry a prayer for forgiveness
out of my mouth. Here, the best lie I know is the spoken word
dissolving the moment it touches the air. Say absolved
& the expedition for the Eridu Genesis returns with our trespasses
unaccounted for. Say salvation & the half finished holy book is dug
easy as a grave from the Earth so that the poem ends
raising the dead. No- say wind so that the poem ends
with a storm. Like you, I crawled into the cavern
hoping to escape the flood & heard nothing but a stone
scraping its body against another, whittling away the shape of sin
carved into its chest. Of course the gods obliterated themselves
at the moment they pitched their finale of penitence
through the sky & of course our heads bowed & of course
we missed the confession. See how light dips now
beneath the latticed barn roof of the good man
who sells us half a cow every year, how he strokes
the underside of the cow’s chin & when it’s his time
& no earlier, when all that’s left of mercy is a slipstream of moonlight
the circumference of a bullet between the cow’s eyes, places the barrel
against the target. Yes, I’m crying because the poem is a noose
& its hand is the only thing not doomed
to end back where it began.
Kiersten Czuwala is a writer and yoga teacher based in upstate New York. Informed by the yoga practice, much of her work involves the exploration of both the physical and spiritual body. Her work has previously appeared in Same Faces Collective and is forthcoming in Samfiftyfour.
