Winter of 1997, Missouri
She stares at marble
eyes, the deer gazing
beyond her maybe seeing Van
Gogh’s Starry Night
upside down from the bed
of a pickup truck,
and the father
places a mop-bucket full
of steaming blood next
to her small body and tells
her it’s life, and she touches
her skinned
knees with life crusted
on the surface, rusted red.
Her father could take her life
if he wished.
She wouldn’t give him the want,
though. She’s feral and coated
in bruises the color of new
potatoes, pale like whipped
butter and cold
like strung up meat in the yard,
and though she’s afraid to look
at life, she plunges her arms
to the elbows in the bucket
of red warmth
as a bull, no a father, slices
the bone, tissue, and ligaments
of the beast from the neck
down.
Kayla Haas is currently enrolled in the creative writing program at Stephen F. Austin State University. Her work has appeared in The Stone Circle, Humid Issue 4, Circa Review, Humid Issue 5, and is forthcoming in Blue Lyra Review and The Story Shack.
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