We give terrible things weight. We reserve special places for them. We give them names and gestures and points of view, and we use them to populate our stories. We pass the worst of the terrible to our children as warnings, as lessons, as fate, as excuse. We perceive the terrible as symbol and use it to find meaning. But we don’t always want to get down in the dirt and look through the bones until they’re picked clean.

The feral word kind of wants to do that. It wants to disturb the fresh dirt and push through the discomfort and wariness to the kind of truth that gets lost in time.

So, yeah, it’s just a place to get underneath the surface and see what we find.

Here’s a fresh poem.

 

The Terrible Ones

Their stench, saturated and gamey,
like the grease of new-cut wool

Terrible ones with wide, in-looking eyes
thin, in-turned lips

Whose mug shots reveal our revile
yet we look upon, and look upon.

Shrouded in orange jump suits, formless, fluid,
they stifle the fiber of schemes

Yoked to our communal conspiracy, mingling among them
in freshly steamed wool suits

Until given the voluptuous crease
of their turned cheeks –

The monsters that stole and slaughtered, mere joints
of a beast our grease anoints.

Dawnell Smith - 2016