A group of boys with bats beat
a porcupine to death one twilight
at the campground out West
while I huddled in my tent and cringed
at the thought of the bloody pulp, coward
deciding not to intervene in case I was next.
I like to think of those boys as dead by now,
flattened like that porcupine, but
their aggressive numbers keep coming,
despite my wish for there to be payback
for such cruelty, and I don’t believe much
in redemption, nor in camping anymore,
not that cities are so civilized.
I flinched as that same stain in the brainpan
erupted at the start of the pandemic panic,
another boy—on 82nd Street—coughed
in my face then laughed as he sauntered away.
What accounts for glitches in that little
almond mass as the light is still warming us,
songbirds trilling their affirmative chorus?
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 26, Issue 2.
Susana H. Case is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Dead Shark on the N Train, from Broadstone Books, 2020, which won a Pinnacle Book Award for Best Poetry Book and a NYC Big Book Award Distinguished Favorite. She is also the author of five chapbooks. Her first collection, The Scottish Café, from Slapering Hol Press, was re-released in a dual-language English-Polish version, Kawiarnia Szkocka by Opole University Press. Case is a Professor and Program Coordinator at the New York Institute of Technology in New York City and can be reached at www.susanahcase.com.
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