Welcome to Poetically Yours. Poetically Yours showcases poems by northern Illinois poets. This week’s featured artist is Veronica Noechel.
Noechel is dedicated to animal rescue. She’s been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and has received generous support from North Carolina Arts Council, the Vermont Studio Center, Headlands Center for the Arts, United Arts Council, The Culture and Animals Foundation, and I-Park. Here’s her poem “Each Nick, to the Heart, is a Fatal Wound.”
My arms feel so empty.
It’s a lie that we grasp for the lightness.
I feel 12lbs short, a little dog less. I guess losing
a little less than a pound of flesh per year is a bargain. It’s just a sliver
of my heart that will never grow closed,
thrown in as a tip to your server. Death
always demands a little more than it’s due.
It taps its foot and sighs loudly
even as we gasp our goodbyes.
So now I’m going to write this down,
make a thousand copies and hand them out
like tragic none-of-your business cards
because every time I’m asked where you are,
I feel my faith in pure, reckless joy
dying in my arms again. And again I hear it crying out
through your death rattle, shivering under
the crushing weight that presses life from your lungs
as you claw at the walls and unconsciously bite
at the escaping air. It’s the sound of you
tearing bleeding bits of your own muscle
in a desperate fight to remain, even as you’re
sinking away. It’s a literal fight to the death.
You’d do that? To stay. With me?
Samsara sucks you out and leaves you shivering
on the blood slick floor. And that’s how
your life begins again. Plopped into a world
you’ll no doubt need rescuing from.
Humans take advantage of naive little animals.
Statistics show you’ll be caged among the other confused,
abandoned, and lost. It’s how we give shelter,
the best we know how. If you’re lucky
you’ll only be caged with good intentions.
We’ll also cage you for sale, for convenience,
for science, for money—something you’ll never fully
understand and I hope you never have to try. Your mother
may live in a box forever, producing young for
auction, for her owner, or a sucker prone to buying affection,
devotion in a shelf-stable package at the mall.
Such an ignorant species, we are clumsy when it comes to love.
Knowing all that, I stand helpless. Useless.
It’s out of my hands and still, I know, my responsibility.
I’ve spent every second that I’ve known you trying
to be of some worth to you. To all of you. But I’m
a guard dog with no bark, no teeth. My pink, drooling gums
unable to delay, let alone waylay death
when it rips you from my arms in cruel fetid silence
or meticulously sucks the fight out of a thousand strays.
It steals without effort, without hesitation and I’m left
holding your empty corpse, calling frantically after you
“pick a good, no--safe rebirth. Please. Please. Please.”
Unintelligibly repeating through blubbery tears,
“Don’t. Let. Us. Hurt. You.” long after
the vet takes your body for burning.
