I tried to drown the sick calf in the cow pond near the black stream last week, but failed. I tied her to the dead oak where the salt blocks hang—she fought me every step. She must have known what I had planned. When she kicked my head in her last lurch with death, I fell and bled on the bank while thick water filled her young lungs. Her scared lows dulled in the rush of last spring’s snow melt. When they found us that night, she was near death, moored to the tree where I lay with face bruised and nose crushed. Tom said they heard her moan when they pulled up and then a hush fell as the trees leaned with the wind. He shot her in the head while Jim built a fire; they burned her corpse to ash. The sweet foul smell stuck to my tongue. They said they wrapped my face in rags, but I saw flames in dusk’s gray glow.
Matthew W. Schmeer’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Redactions, Poetry South, Slipstream, Sliver of Stone Magazine, Marathon Literary Review, Really System, Panoply, indicia, Slippery Elm, Surreal Poetics, Cream City Review, Natural Bridge, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the University of Missouri at St. Louis and is a Professor of English at Johnson County Community College in Overland Park, Kansas.