In this special spooky Halloween episode, we talk about Anna Journey's terrifying and haunting poem "Mercy." We consider serial killers and Brett Kavanaugh, squirrel meat and patriarchal violence, and the ghoulish openness of the grotesque. Content Warning: Sexual Violence. Read the poem below. More on Journey: http://annajourney.com/ Check out Journey’s collection, Vulgar Remedies, where this poem comes from: https://lsupress.org/books/detail/vulgar-remedies/ Check out her other books here: http://annajourney.com/books/ Check out the referenced article by Journey: https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Earn+the+Vomit:+employing+the+Grotesque+in+contemporary+Poetry.-a0380527469 Find us on facebook at: facebook.com/closetalking Find us on twitter at: twitter.com/closetalking You can always send us an e-mail with thoughts on this or any of our previous podcasts, as well as suggestions for future shows, at [email protected]. Mercy by Anna Journey She spends the night with a man who once hunted deer, who keeps squirrel meat stacked in his deep freezer, the white ice rising over red cubes like the animals’ fur as it returns. Cold night, she rolls closer to fit the curve of his quilt- slurred spine. She remembers the patches’ outlines: scattered houses snipped from dead women’s linen, those thin A-frames. Better to snap the neck of a shot deer than to wait for it to slowly bleed. He believes this. A sleepwalker, he often wakes with a different woman’s head between his knees. He holds her vertebrae in place as one hand cups the jugular, the other seizes the skull. He wakes to the dull warmth of limbs kicking the sheets, to the scream of a deer becoming a woman.

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“What did the council decide on item 42?” — answered with the speaker and the moment.

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