Animals: Two Poems by Erica Hom
Visayan Sacrifice Myth
“The most beautiful part of your body is where it’s headed.”
- Ocean Vuong
Lola once saw a butiki drop its own tail - like a gun still searing with smoke.
She looked through me and said, “There will be money soon”,
Even now, I wonder; how could loss ever welcome wealth?
Remembering how the severed limb shook on the ground.
She bows three times.
Before Mother left, my uncle gave the gods the fattest hen we had.
I suppose this is why when I walk, I ask the earth to forgive me,
As I remember the blood of the hen fertilizing the fields,
its body still apologizing to the soil.
We divest from earthly illusion, remove our bones
and make room for the black eyed god.
He demands a sacrifice: this story is older than rain.
Airport terminal. A son holds his mother like rosary beads
minutes before she boards a plane to be carried over the sea.
When she left, she took the earth’s rotation with her.
Trinity of jasmine flowers awaken where her feet once stood,
only to fade, and bloom again.
The butiki severs its tail and from nothing, it grows again.
The tide sweeps the shells out to the sea, as it always does,
Singing psalms of how the first Tagalogs came from the sea.
A son imagines his mother one day returning, cradled in bamboo.
Wildlife in the Chernobyl exclusion zone is thriving
The increasing number of lynx and bison
are almost enough to forget
that four hundred pine trees turned to ash
in the explosion’s immediate aftermath.
How many elk followed
the sweet scent of wet grass?
Did they have time to notice
the notes of sulfur, of blackened rubber?
But tonight, the sky is staggering
and studded with stars, galaxies twirling
like mushroom clouds above newborn puppies
tumbling through the sunflowers.
It is important to remember
we don’t know how healthy these animals are:
how many of their organs are melting slowly,
how many tumors line their lungs like rotting fruit.
For how long has toxic air
poured over the earth’s skin
like forests of vein and muscle
stretched taut over bone?
And tomorrow,
the peach fuzzed soldiers
will gather up the dead dogs
despite the radioactive dust in their fur.
As they bury them, they think of their fathers -
army boots carving puppy paws
into the shifting sand; lashed away by poison wind.
About Erica Hom
Erica Hom is a writer, educator, and artist based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She is a reader for Sledgehammer Lit and Sepia Journal. Her poems have previously featured in Hecate Magazine, Rhodora Magazine, Voices from the Attic, Line Rider Press, Crow and Cross Keys, Swim Press, and elsewhere. You can find more of her writing on instagram at @ericadoingthings
