Trophies; Wolf Season by Rowan Tate

Trophies

he stuffed me

with torn weather maps,

resin,

the molars of birds.

hung me up

in the hall between his

great-grandfather's saber

and a deer

with lipstick on its antlers.

I rot pretty, he says.

like a museum

of collapsed lungs.

my mouth,

wired in permanent

awe.

my breastbone

still hot from

his gloved revisions.

I am not allowed to blink

but I see.

they bring their sons

to point.

this one, they say,

used to speak.

Wolf Season

These are old stories. They hang

from the rafters with the garlic braid.

They wait for the right kind of silence.

There are names you must never speak

after dark. There is a girl that left

the village they say swallowed faces.

I remember once, in January, finding feathers

circling a dead fire. The smoke rose straight to heaven

the way it does when spirits accept the offering.

Above us, the stars were lit like votives.

We were told not to point. The sky, Baba said,

doesn’t forgive what you name too easily.

These are old ghosts. My grandmother

knew them by name. They would drink tea

with her next to the stove, she says.

There is a bowl of pickled beets,

wet like organs. Her voice still sits like a tongue

over the land, calling the cows home.

I once saw a deer collapse in the orchard.

We watched from the window as its blood

melted a dark hole in the frost.

The crows gathered quickly. Above them,

the goosefleshed sky tightened its throat,

like we were choking it.