by Danielle Wirsansky
The Wife Hunters
On this day
in the long grass,
they hide camouflaged.
The wife hunters are here, and they don’t mean
to leave empty-handed. Their scent carries
without need of a breeze, a pulsing cloud of
back-slapping belt-swagger
thick enough to lick.
I press my muzzle to the ground,
antlers snagged in dark branches
:;struggle;:
Pray with libations of cold sweat to go unnoticed.
I don’t know if I’m full-grown. Enough.
Would they catch and release me, a mercy?
Spineless, terror-limp, handled like the dead weight
of pre-cut meat.
Or will they check my hooves, one leg at a time,
crowding and probing. Open
my mouth, spin a finger inside;
look past my gift teeth
into the cavern of my chest and
send a canary down into the shaft. They sound
me out for resonance as if to say,
‘This one is ready,
she is ripe.’
Impossible. I rotted seconds before
I was caught.
Lindz McLeod’s short stories have been published by the Scotsman newspaper, the Scottish Book Trust, the Dundee Victoria & Albert Museum, and more. Her poetry has been published by Allegory Ridge, Impossible Archetype, and more. Lindz is the competition secretary of the Edinburgh Writer’s Club and holds a Masters in Creative Writing. Her writing can be found at www.lindzmcleod.co.uk
Danielle Wirsansky is a photographer whose main interest is telling stories through her work. Her photography has been published in such publications as The Weird Reader, Genre: Urban Arts Magazine, Sad Girl Review, Anti-Heroin Chic Magazine, Bleached Butterfly Magazine, and more. To learn more about her work, visit www.DanielleWirsansky.com.