I’d like to devour him whole,
Ursula tells me, a thin film of morning coffee
just furring her lip. He’s perfectly ready now –
I’ll suck the fat clean off his bones. From the porch
we watch her boys scuttle ant-like through the fields,
their brown arms waving like ready wheat
in the distance. The sun rises stoutly behind them.
It’s a hog-killing day, and her husband has his prime

confined and well-fed in the hay barn, this one fat
but not too, his flanks taut and sturdy as a pulse.
It’s no easy job, this killing – Ursula’s warned me
of the blood, its greasy veil on our palms and in the tread
of our boots, and of the smell that hangs
through the hair on our scalps. When I told Ursula

I’d never eaten fresh-killed hog or free-range,
even, she came for me the next day before dawn
in her husband’s faded Nissan, and we drove thirty miles
from the mammoth grit of the city to her organic farm,
the stout, brown boar already sequestered in the barn.
Now Ursula rises at her husband’s call and motions me

from the porch. She walks without pause to the barn,
dodging the puddles from last night’s rain,
me lagging just behind, uncertain, not wanting to see
but finally needing to, ashamed by my need.
The figures of her boys still penetrate the morning
skyline, the jaunty bronze of their bodies a silent caper
beneath the climbing yellow sun,
and for a moment I am there with them,
careless and freefalling, not seeing Ursula stalwart
in the barn, the fat from the boar gleaming
under tight, golden skin.