Poems by Chloe Hanson
“Bluebeard”
By Chloe Hanson
Would
you be afraid to marry a man
with
taxidermied heads mounted
on
his walls? Mountain goat. Big-
horned
sheep. Elk. A bear, perhaps,
or
some other predator, mouth agape,
sharp
incisors dipped in resin? Would you
be
afraid of his collection, disembodied
faces
meaning there were once bodies,
the
eyes replaced with glass, blood
with
sawdust and rags, dermoplasty,
misshapen?
He always leaves behind
a
few bones. Would you be afraid
of
the implied gunshot, the set
of
knives for skinning and snipping,
his
easy way of crafting normalcy,
faking
life? Could you sleep
in
a room while each face looked
not
at you, but over you — Gods
who
see all and choose to turn away?
“Billy Beg and His Bull”
By
Chloe Hanson
There once was a Queen who loved a bull
as she loved her son, raised both at her
breast.
As her son grew, the bull taught him to
love
as fully as their mother. But the Queen
fell
ill, her rose-petal face shriveled as a
flower in autumn.
She made her husband promise never to
part her children:
bull and boy. The king, who could not
imagine
what was to come, agreed.
As is the way of Kings, he remarried one
of his wife’s maids,
lovely and dim as a faint star. More
than anything, the new Queen
despised the bull — his eyes round and
white as two peeled eggs,
the smell of young boy. She begged her
husband to slaughter
the beast, but found the King’s loyalty
to his first Queen
a deeply planted, if dormant, seed.
The Queen still had many friends from
her days of servitude, none
so dear as the Hen Wife, a stout woman
in a blood-spattered apron,
grim expression, round face. Tell the King you are not well.
The Hen Wife, plucked the puckered
corpse
of a chicken, divided the flesh in two.
I
will make sure he does the deed.
The Queen painted herself as a death
mask: dun pallor, sunken eyes.
The Hen Wife told the king the only cure
was a bowl of blood
from the bull. The King’s hands shook,
eyes watered. For days
he prayed for his wife’s recovery. But
he stopped short
of taking a blade to the bull’s throat.
Color bled through the Queen’s powdered
cheeks.
Husband,
she said, at your table, do you not eat
all
sorts of red meats? This bull is their brother.
The King, sufficiently shamed, prayed
when he met his first Queen in Heaven,
she would forgive him.
Do not think I’ve forgotten the boy and
his bull, who heard
the whispers from the kitchen, prepared
to run,
live their lives in the forest, eat all
the green things of the earth,
to never again witness the hell of
slaughter. As is so often the case
with best-laid plans, things went
astray. The bull was captured, crated
with the rest of the living feed.
If
your mother, like mine, read you this story
you
might remember boy and bull escaping the palace.
You
might remember an honorable death for the bull,
who
protected his brother, the boy, with his final breath.
You
might remember the boy wed a princess,
and
their table was forever filled with green and blooming things.
But
if like me, you always felt connected to the gory original stories:
Cinderella’s
stepsisters and their missing toes,
wicked
Queens dancing in red-hot shoes til their bones glittered
against
the iron, then you know the bull was served smothered
in
rich blood gravy, the Queen miraculously recovered,
and
within the year her stomach and breasts began to swell.
“Guilt”
By Chloe Hanson
I
follow rescue pets on Instagram. I think of how many I could fit
between
my couch and the wall, in the tupperware boxes
under
my bed, ‘til the house became engorged with my goodness.
Mornings
in bed, I watch videos of pig sanctuaries
and
never once think of the smell of their crackling skin,
though,
if I did, I might feel my lip curl back, my teeth
might
grind against each other as if gnawing gristle from bone,
guided
by some primitive part of myself I do not recognize.
What
I do know is how to cut a rump roast with a deli slicer,
how
to de-vein a shrimp in one slick motion, how to crack
a
wishbone. I know that the acid in my throat when I see a video
of
a dog caged and ready for slaughter in some unfamiliar country
has
a different taste from the burn that comes from a face
pressed
against a cattle car at a stoplight
where
I scroll through my feed and follow the stories of lucky ducks
and
elderly chickens, of extraordinary pigs solving puzzles and perplexed
farmers
who wonder why their dog ran away after they sold their cow,
the
same cow the dog snuggled long before he answered to his own name.
“Dairy
Pride”
By Chloe Hanson
Like
any TV father, I’m sure
he
calls his daughter princess
while
serving her a glass of milk,
white,
thick, unblemished
as
her skin, both mother-fresh,
newly-poured.
Americana poster-children,
this
family draws water from private wells.
Meanwhile
the surface is no longer safe
for
swimming, drinking. But there’s always
milk
in the fridge. Glass-bottled nostalgia.
Father
turns to camera. Do you know
he
asks, dairy is both healthy and
sustainable?
He
tousles TV-daughter’s hair, she sips,
smiles
with wet upper lip. Thanks, Dad!
She’s
not his child any more than the penned
creature
in the next shot is her mother,
no
matter how this girl suckles
at
the swollen teet. The father pours
another
glass, this one for show only:
glue
thinned with water, impossible-
white.
- Chloe Hanson is a Ph.D. candidate at
the University of Tennessee. Her work has recently been featured in The Rumpus, Gargoyle, and Contemporary
Verse 2. Her current project is a book of poems titled Making a Killing, which re-tells fairy tales to draw attention to
the systemic violence and oppression of both humans and nonhuman animals.
Copyright©2020 by Chloe Hanson. All
Rights Reserved.