Episode #049 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: http://annajourney.com/

Check out Journey’s collection, Vulgar Remedies, where this poem comes from: https://lsupress.org/books/detail/vulgar-remedies/

Check out her other books here: http://annajourney.com/books/

Check out the referenced article by Journey: https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Earn+the+Vomit:+employing+the+Grotesque+in+contemporary+Poetry.-a0380527469

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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.