The Smashing of a Carcass

The Smashing of a Carcass


It was the year when the ground hogs started infesting
our field, burrowing their mindless tunnels
until it was all nearly hollow. I’m a lot like that field,

Dad would drape the comment over our shoulders, my brother,
Will, and I felt exactly the same thing except Will’s neck
and face was full of autumn, the colors pushing up

beneath the skin; a warm, subtle soreness, so his feeling
was a little different. He stood a little further away
from the father but still swallowed the field whole.

It was that year when Dad taught us how to hunt.
How to be predators. How to be quiet and patient. Waiting
for the right moment, even if years passed, to strike and rid

the vermin. We would sit in the field for hours. Not speaking.
Waiting by the hole for the ground hog
to look for his shadow but only finding a bullet.

We would eat him later. I remember another year,
Christmas, Will and I got Critter Cages. Will transformed
his into a torture chamber. He had a library of tools

to burn, de-fragment, poke, restrain, crush.
I would watch him do his meticulous work. Watch him spray
the hair spray, light the lighter. I would watch grasshoppers

squirm in their exoskeleton segments as they burned.
My brother’s eyes plain and indifferent.
Sometimes he would laugh. I watched.

A year later he beat the ground hog
with a log then with a baseball bat.
Relentlessly smashing the carcass I watched.

A dog barked. We never told Dad about the ground hog.
We tossed the formless body deep into the woods
but the dog kept dragging it back out.


I originally wrote this in the Fall of 2004 while I was in Adrian Blevins Poetry II class at Colby College. It was during this year that I explored writing many autobiographical poems, many about my family. I have revised this poem many times.