Current Issue: Fall/Winter 2011

Inheritance  
Brandon Courtney

                We spend our morning squatting in the byre’s
sweltering manger, chopping his estate: shovels
                hang from hooks and bent nails, push brooms,
foot plough, and sledge. Later, we’ll comb the tithe

                barn, tack room, stables, and granary, searching
for hand tools surrendered to last year’s snowdrift,
                silo, and trough. We are lost in the corncrib’s
slant-light. My father hoarded a lifetime of tools

                to sheath and holster, boot and shoulder, swing
and wheel: a pearl grip pistol dowered at his mother’s
                shotgun wedding, a boot knife, a sickle, an adze.
He’d taught me how to use them all: leather strops

                to hone metal, a whetstone to fin curved blades,
a razor sharp enough to open the hive of a deer’s
                piping heart. It’s too much for my mother,
this sifting through—divvying tools like loaves of bread.

                Birds break like a fever over the barn,
and it’s easy to remember winter: a Saanen runt lacerating
                milk from his mother’s teat, scissoring
her paunch into thick ribbons; she, on her side, delirious,

                ignorant to his bleating. Nights I can’t sleep,
it surfaces: the kid nudging his bloody snout
                into his mother’s nipples, drinking his fill
of cream; how my father crashed the hammer’s

                claw into the crown of his skull to salvage her.
I still see his mother sponging his splintered
                head with her tongue, a thread of black ants
swimming through the wound.

 

Brandon Courtney spent four years in the United States Navy. His work is forthcoming or appears in Best New Poets 2009, Linebreak, BOXCAR Poetry Review, The Raleigh Review, Tar River Review, and The Los Angeles Review among many others, and he has recently been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and is a finalist for the Oboh Poetry Prize. He attends the MFA program at Hollins University.