~ after "The Slaughtered Ox," Rembrandt (1655)
Katay is the name for it Meaning flayed
Tufted open Inside out After the fire
singes the hair off flesh and the knife
makes its rapid zigzag through
the body's tent It is important
to know what plunged into that humid
pit The entire forearm scoured the depths
for every gift the animal could surrender
The lungs' heaving bellows Islands of spleen The liver
pooling in a green lagoon With what should we anoint
the pearled clots in the viscera A ladder
of bones revealed as the hand flies up
to the mouth More startled than clumps of leaf
pulling away from touch From
the anonymous bodies dumped there
night after night after night
Poet Luisa A. Igloria (Poetry Foundation web page, author webpage ) is the winner of the 2015 Resurgence Prize (UK), the world’s first major award for ecopoetry, selected by former UK poet laureate Sir Andrew Motion, Alice Oswald, and Jo Shapcott. She is the author of What is Left of Wings, I Ask (2018 Center for the Book Arts Letterpress Chapbook Prize, selected by former US Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey); Bright as Mirrors Left in the Grass (Kudzu House Press eChapbook selection for Spring 2015), Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser (Utah State University Press, 2014 May Swenson Prize), Night Willow (Phoenicia Publishing, 2014), The Saints of Streets (University of Santo Tomas Publishing House, 2013), Juan Luna’s Revolver (2009 Ernest Sandeen Prize, University of Notre Dame Press), and nine other books. She is a member of the core faculty of the MFA Creative Writing Program at Old Dominion University which she directed from 2009-2015. In 2018, she was the inaugural Glasgow Distinguished Writer in Residence at Washington and Lee University. When she isn’t writing, reading, or teaching, she cooks with her family, knits, hand-binds books, and listens to tango music.