Animorph Enters the Doggie-Dog World
Discover the power at age eleven. Discover all powers
at age eleven. A kittenhead struggles out of your face
and the kittenhead mews MILK, you gasp with its
mouth and it slurps itself back. Yet the mew for MILK
remains, you drink it. You think, âI am an Animorph.â
Your sight and your hearing increase, like wheat
and the wind in the wheat. Well youâve never seen
any wheat but it sounds good, to you and your new
trembling ears. Blue sky increases above the wheat
and you know what itâs like to grow a . . . well.
A hawkâs is between two legs but much higher.
Halfway to any animal is where you like
to be. Get halfway there and have just the instinct,
the instinct that someoneâs approaching. Stripes
begin to form, are always a surprise, you look
down and you move your head left to right and then
the meaning comes. English get worse but not much
in your muzzle, English get worse but not much
in your mouth. You walk to school and sit next
to a girl who was born with a tail and you copy off
her. You rub your temples when they ache, rub any
of your body when it aches, you seem to be only
a series of places where animal parts could emerge.
Soon you will be a teenager, and soon you will be
so greasy, and how you can hardly wait, because:
its grease makes the animal graceful, and go. You go
to the petting zoo with your class and timidly reach
in a hand. Turn to a donkey and finally
feel your lashes are long enough. Turn to a horse
and finally feel that your eyes are so meltingly human.
Walk home on your own through the fields and the fields,
and the increase of wheat and the wind in it, and think
of the life that stretches before you: work your way
through all the animals, and come to the end of them,
and what? And turn to crickets, and make no noise?
One tear struggles out of your face, but no thatâs not
a tear. âI fuckin eat crickets,â your kittenhead says,
âI fuckin eat silence of crickets for fun. I got life after
life and a name like Baby. Every time I try to cry a tear
a new kittenhead grows out of me.â And oh how you
are lifted, then,
the kittenhead of you in the high hawk hold.
The Hatfields and McCoys
I am waiting for the day when the Hatfields
and McCoys finally become interesting to me,
when they flare with significance at last as if
theyâd been written in Early Times Whiskey
and the match of my sight had been flicked
and was racing now along them, and racing
like a line to their housesâwho wasted
all this whiskey, and now everything is lit up:
how they hid behind trunks of oaks, and hid
behind herds of cows, how they aimed like teats
at each other and shot death in a straight white
line; I will learn how it began, probably over
a . . .
gal
, or McCoy gave a Hatfield an unfair
grade for a paper about mammals he worked
really hard on, and his dad to whom grades
were life and death kindled a torch in the night,
and burned her grading hand to ashes along
with all the rest of her, but her name McCoy
escaped from the fire and woke up in seven
brothers. I will learn how
their underdrawers fought each other while
hanging on the line, how socks disappeared
from their pairs, how new mailmen were killed
every day touching poisoned postcards they sent
to each other, which said things like Wish you
WERENT
here, and
GOODBYE
from sunny Spain,
I will learn precise numbers of people who died
and where they put all the bodies, under the garden
maybe, where they helped grow blood-red carrots
that longed to lodge in enemy throats,
where they helped grow brooding tomatoes
that were still considered deadly back then, as part
of the nightshade family. Two of their babies
fell in love, because love comes earlier for people
who live in the past and the mountains,
and when they turned one year old
they were told they were Hatfields and McCoys,
and one
Jonathon Burgess
Todd Babiak
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Krystal Shannan, Camryn Rhys
Margaret Yorke
David Lubar
Wendy May Andrews
Avery Aames