JAR OF PENNIES
The year my mother worked
the slaughterhouse,
she came home smelling of blood:
a jar of pennies smell.
I squeezed her pant leg
and felt the dried blood
itching like wool.
She pushed me
away, not wanting any more
smells on her.
She told me about
the cows collapsing
in the slaughter room,
the pigs tugging and tugging
their bodies from her grip,
and how the blood washed
from her hands.
We only ate chicken
for that year.
Her ex-boyfriend knocked
on the door. The last time
he was in the house,
he pulled and pulled
at her arms, then pinned her
on the couch.
I sat at the dinner table,
fumbling with dinnerware.
She washed the blood
off her lips. We only needed steak
for her black eyes.
For a long year, my hands
smelled of pennies,
and my face was red with rashes
from wool. We ate chicken
and ignored the knocking
at the door. Locked it,
bolted it, made sure
we didn’t make noise.
—from Rattle #36, Winter 2011
__________
Sean Karns: “I was thinking about domestic violence. During a period in my childhood, my mother dated an abusive boyfriend and worked at a slaughterhouse in Springfield, Ohio. I saw a juxtaposition between human-human and human-livestock interaction: how we, as humans, at times treat each other like livestock.”
