I Passed Three Girls Killing a Goat

I passed three girls killing a goat, shotgun

leaned up against a tree and the entrails

spilling into a coil on the ground. It was hooked

between the tendons of its back legs

to a high branch that gently creaked

like a dry hinge busybody aunties wouldn’t oil.

Blood drained into a pail, you could smell it

shifting with the air, and black flies landed

in the shadows of things where the wind

didn’t touch. I dreamed I was carrying a sack

filled with animals, and it dragged blood

in the gravel and stained my skirt hem, you could follow my trail

to the county line where old men

sat on the liquor store porch. One crooked his half-arm

for the bottle where the auger had caught his hand.

I dreamed I was in a new country rinsing livers

under a spigot, and the men cracking

black walnuts on a stone named my limbs

like the weather, like none of us knew

the same words. By the tree the girls and the goat

were faltering, one squatted to sharpen

her blackened blade on a strop, and the men

on the county line leaned back on the heels

of their chairs talking about anything, each other,

spring weather, the long-haired boy scalped

by a combine, and one of them swore you only plant

beans with the moon in Capricorn otherwise

the fields choke up with scrub juniper. One

looked intently at his left palm; his right wrist

uselessly brushed the woven seat of his chair.

When a wind came, the screen door leapt up

on its leather hinges which never creaked

and slammed shut. Mud daubers in the muck

by the spigot blew sideways around my ankles and up

under my skirt, and inside I could hear

the woman who lived with the liquor store proprietor

cursing as she locked up the vanilla like she knew

how to break the back of a ghost.