Mercy
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Mercy
When the sow doesn’t refuse them her sequence of teats. When her swollen, spotted body, bristles spearing mud, permits
a dozen snouts’ pressure burrowing beneath her— unapologetic litter of grunts, hungry self-serving soldiers, cacophonous squeals urging over, over.
Not to protect her face from their hooves, but that she could crush them, we pen her in. Narrow. Leave only enough room for her to lie down.
When she doesn’t, in a quiet rage, slaughter them herself, she suffers each unrelenting mouth, she sates our wild expectations. [End Page 888]
Jonterri Gadson recently received the MFA from the University of Virginia. She has published poems in Poetry Quarterly, Tidal Basin Review, PANK, The Rumpus, and other periodicals. She is currently a Herbert W. Martin Post Graduate Fellow in Creative Writing at the University of Dayton in Ohio.
