Every poem in my mind starts as a poem about Jodeci
by Kate Sweeney

Except I still haven’t gotten an answer on why the hind 
              leg of a deer was hanging in the basement 

and where the rest of its body went. But it was there 
              for weeks strung up in intricate Shibari, whip-

stitched & bulging. and maybe that’s where it all started, 
               a skinless deer thigh hanging in the basement, heat 

coming off its flesh in waves of steam. We can speculate:
               the adults put it there so that we wouldn’t notice 

them— bruised marriages, hands puckered from pleasuring 
              themselves or each other. But we noticed. 

And they knew it, and let the blood pool on the cement 
             anyway, just out front the basement fridge and 

I swear I still think of it when I’m doing something terrifying 
             like walking alone in the canyon while the coyote 

breed, or when I give birth or head or a speech and I can 
             still count the blood slapping the cement in a recon-

ciliation of this fear maybe, and as I watch a shoeless man 
             lean against the back door of a restaurant, pull down 

his pants and shoot himself in the dick with drugs, right 
             as the sun is just getting there, to the point in the sky 

that beads the sweat on the lower back and starts a person 
             considering shade. It seems we’ve moved past 

the point of discretion, multiplied the pain. Just that morning 
             you described the only dog you’ve ever loved–Cleopatra 

reincarnated. Coal-lined eyes, all that raw beauty, the vigor 
            of her thighs when she moved on a squirrel. 

And this thigh, a shadow swinging in the bald light of a lamp-
            less bulb. The light in an empty basement, a hollow 

click of string used to turn it on or off, but never steady. 
            The countless times I turned my eyes toward it 

as a distraction, as an answer to the hands 
             climbing my legs pulling at my panties, 

the damp smell of basement 
             catching in my throat.

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Kate Sweeney has poems most recently appearing or forthcoming from Birdcoat Quarterly, Jetfuel Review, Northwest Review, SWWIM  & other places. Kate has a chapbook, The Oranges Will Still Grow Without US [Ethel 2022]. She is Marketing Director for The Adroit Journal & Word is Bond Reading Series and resides in Los Angeles.