Calling the Hogs
H
E ain’t coming back tonight. Next night neither. You hear your marrow cresting its cricks & miss what you never thought you’d miss: him snoring through midnight, uvula clocking its knocker on his throat’s narrow door. The hogs housed in his hothouse mouth—whose truffle they rootin’ now? You collage women in your sleep: knees nylon-sleeved, wrists angled to hips, ears clamped ‘round his late-night sounds—those women a fly- trap & he the fly. You head outside in a bathrobe blue & moth-mangled, find a patch of grass green enough to dream it be a field, then lie down, nipple the fang-toothed moon, unseed the pearl buttons fastening your ribs till bones axe dark. Your chest basins its trough, unctuous butter of your esophagus flushed & fattening, your lungs sear like a filet in the heat. Buffet of pinks, your heart dins its dinner-bell. You don’t care if he potbellies home to eat. You just want a whiff to wander in’m. He should know he’s missed a feast.
Diamond Forde’s debut collection, Mother Body, is the winner of the 2019 Saturnalia Poetry Prize. Forde has received numerous awards and prizes, including a Pink Poetry Prize, a Furious Flower Poetry Prize, and was a finalist for the 2022 Kate Tufts Discovery Award from Claremont Graduate University. A Callaloo, Tin House, and Ruth Lilly Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg fellow, Forde’s work has appeared in Boston Review, Obsidian, Massachusetts Review, and more. She serves as the interviews editor of Honey Literary, the fiction editor of Nat. Brut, and she lives in Asheville with her partner and their dog, Oatmeal.
