Caitlin Scarano
Poetry
Caitlin Scarano is a poet in the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee PhD creative writing program. She was a finalist for the 2014 Best of the Net Anthology and the winner of the 2015 Indiana Review Poetry Prize, judged by Eduardo Corral. She has two poetry chapbooks: The White Dog Year (dancing girl press, 2015) and The Salt and Shadow Coiled (Zoo Cake Press, 2015).
Moon Among Mammals
human. Moon can be a man
missing teeth or an animal
with an oar-shaped tongue,
who watched me sleepwalk
through the snakes of my half-life.
When I woke to a gunshot
it was only a bird's
skull on the antique window
glass in my mother's belly. A collie
digging up pecans in the backyard
that was as wide as a country
but shrunk to a wink
when my sisters and I aged
to white eyeshadow and Camels
behind the rotting playhouse.
When I visited my father last
winter, he was dying
of liver cancer. I once saw that dog,
the collie, kill a hen with her eyes
open. I once saw my father
climb a tree so tall he disappeared
into the moon's laughing
milk-white mouth.
“ ‘Moon Among Mammals’ opens with a line that is in conversation with a famous Marge Piercy poem (http://apoemaday.tumblr.com/post/30393085990/the-moon-is-always-female). In my writing, I am almost always contemplating (running up against?) the constructs of sex and gender and the impact those constructs have on my family, my upbringing, my sexuality, and my day-to-day life and decision-making. I'm also very fascinated by animal imagery and metaphor. Regarding the events behind the poem, on Christmas Eve Day 2014, I visited my father in Tennessee. I had not seen him in nearly a decade. He died ten days later. In the months that followed, almost every poem I wrote turned toward this event, even when I tried to write about something else. This is one poem from that time. ”