Rebecca Morgan Frank
The Goat's Eye
Radio, Radio
Apology
Rebecca Morgan Frank
Rebecca Morgan Frank's fourth collection, Oh You Robot Saints!, is forthcoming from Carnegie Mellon in 2021. She is also the author of Sometimes We're All Living in a Foreign Country and The Spokes of Venus, both from Carnegie Mellon University Press, and Little Murders Everywhere (Salmon Poetry), a finalist for the 2013 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. She received the Poetry Society of America's Alice Fay di Castagnola Award for her next manuscript in progress. Her poems have recently appeared in such places as The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Orion, Kenyon Review, and Poetry Ireland. She is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Memorious: a journal of new verse & fiction.
Rebecca Morgan Frank
Three Poems
The Goat’s Eye
after The Three Surgeons
The surgeons were showing off.
“Cut off my hand!” “Dig out
my eye!” “Carve my heart right
out!” Each one bragged, “I
will sew it back into the seam
of me.” As always, a servant girl
is blamed for the missing parts,
and her lover saves the day
by scavenging for organs
at the gallows and the farmyard.
The real thief, the cat, pays
only with her golden eye,
the pupil a slender almond
slit, vertical and calculating.
But in the original, the surgeon’s
eye is replaced with a goat’s.
The pupil of a goat’s eye is square,
a panoramic camera capturing
all future violence. A scapegoat
was made to take on the sins of man.
So what does a goat see from
inside a man? The greed of grass
changing hands? Something the satyr
can’t hear? Can’t run from?
The surgeon carves up the goat,
the three surgeons feast and drink.
The servant girl cleans the bloody
knife, the platter, three plates.
Radio, Radio
Listen at the edge of the yard– the crickets
bubbling up, tuning the end of summer.
The baseball game calling through static.
Over on the bridge, an old man is still fishing.
No one has told them they’ve stopped stocking
the pond. No one has told him the game has ended.
Why shouldn’t the dead talk through
these currents? Who says we’re not listening?
Apology
Something
in the yard,
unspoken and rusted,
holds the threat of barb,
the slippery mud’s
impatience with our
steps. You once
asked for my forgiveness
and I withheld
everything.
I knew
what a lie was
and how its roots
traveled. After,
the yard was full
of bittersweet
nightshade:
it had been crawling
underneath us
the whole time.