Megan Blankenship
Two POEMS
In Defense of Adherents of Religions Based on Blood Sacrifice
Three throats at once
chicken blood showers
into the bin and hardens
to a block of red jelly
you could slice
with a length of string.
Sixty deaths. Twice
as many meals or more.
The men have a system:
cones, cuts, plucker.
Not gentle, but subtle
and quick. Think
of the sons of Levi,
with their dark beards
and spattered forearms.
How quietly they must
have moved through
the smoky tents. Think
of their terror. I’m not
saying the opened body
of a bird evinces
an accurate theology.
I’m asking if you’ve
been changed by
what’s happened here.
Sunday Morning
There’s talk of shooting dogs this morning:
air pellets for ones too rough with lambs,
something worse for wild hogs.
If you find a carcass in a creek bed,
check for hooves before you start to fret.
Mother boils beans by the bucketful.
Everybody and the preacher
will come for lunch, a pack of babies
tearing through the house.
For every fire, a hundred oaks,
for every oak, a hundred squirrels—
by which I mean we’re doing fine.
Yet for all the time I can remember,
the end’s been nigh. We’ve laid in
bullets and batteries, sugar and salt,
for a judgment never far away:
communism, rapture, a flood like ‘82.
I don’t like to go to church,
but for my mother’s sake, I do.
Megan Blankenship (she/her) lives in the Ozark Mountains. She holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Arkansas (2016). Her work has appeared most recently in Southern Indiana Review and New Ohio Review, and she was the 2018 recipient of the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency.