Turkeys

Trigger warning: mentions of animal death

Seen on video:

two males strut up to a female,

gobbling, displaying.

Their snoods are engorged.

Muzak plays.

One of them twists violently,

drops.

The other one flees,

warily returns to nuzzle his brother’s body,

even jumping on it

as if to say, “Quit playing around.”

Then it too drops dead.

I now see

that the female is a decoy,

and the hero of the scene,

a young man wearing camouflage like feathers,

holds up his prey by the feet

and grins into the camera.

“I have never in my life

shot a turkey

in the head

with a bow…

and this guy came back

and I freakin’ got him too.”

He “got” him from ten feet away,

the same distance from my deck

where our local flock,

confident in human exurbs,

poked in the yard

earlier this morning,

this second Monday in October.

I lift my eyes to the eternal bay beyond,

and my gut hurts,

and I wonder what Penobscot men

would have thought

of conquering not for food

but for blood.

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Jim Krosschell’s poems and essays have appeared in some 70 journals, and he
has published two essay collections: One Man’s Maine, which won a Maine
Literary Award, and Owls Head Revisited. He lives in Northport, ME and Newton,
MA, and is Board President of the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance.