Episode 49: Mercy - Anna Journey

In this special spooky Halloween episode, we talk about Anna Journey's terrifying and haunting poem "Mercy." We consider serial killers and Brett Kavanaugh, squirrel meat and patriarchal violence, and the ghoulish openness of the grotesque. Content Warning: Sexual Violence.

Read the poem below. More on Journey: annajourney.com/ Check out Journey’s collection, Vulgar Remedies, where this poem comes from: lsupress.org/books/detail/vulgar-remedies/ Check out her other books here: annajourney.com/books/ Check out the referenced article by Journey: www.thefreelibrary.com/Earn+the+Vomi….-a0380527469 Find us on facebook at: facebook.com/closetalking
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You can always send us an e-mail with thoughts on this or any of our previous podcasts, as well as suggestions for future shows, at closetalkingpoetry@gmail.com.

Mercy
by Anna Journey

She spends the night with a man who once hunted deer,
who keeps squirrel meat

stacked in his deep freezer, the white ice
rising over red cubes like the animals’

fur as it returns. Cold night, she rolls closer to fit
the curve of his quilt-

slurred spine. She remembers
the patches’ outlines: scattered houses snipped

from dead women’s linen, those thin
A-frames. Better to snap

the neck of a shot deer than to wait for it
to slowly bleed. He believes this.

A sleepwalker, he often wakes
with a different woman’s

head between his knees. He holds
her vertebrae in place as one hand

cups the jugular, the other seizes
the skull. He wakes to the dull warmth

of limbs kicking the sheets, to the scream
of a deer becoming a woman.