Moonlit Effigies
Once we weighed
all the scarecrows from our father’s
fields. I don’t remember
what we were trying to prove,
but we counted
ourselves lucky.
To know the full sky without
a fear for the heaviness of our bodies.
To run. Legs stretching
like the dying light of day.
Fish still in the ponds.
At night they howled.
Straw men like crucifixes hung from
the moon. Lesser saviors
of the crops. The wind
gave them voices.
I still shiver to remember
how he, our father, stormed
the fields drunken curses
foaming his lips. How
he stormed our
bedrooms too. Sometimes.
His anger a bright halo, scarlet
as a moon that comes only
three times a year.
Cold as winter glass.
We knew even then, sometimes
the shadows that chased us through
the long grass would be
men. Knew how
their stomachs turn
to hungers we can’t imagine.
Wolves prowling the midnight
corn with ghosts in their guts
and nothing the crucified
can do but watch.
Zachary Kluckman is a nationally ranked slam poet, acclaimed spoken word artist, and 2x Pushcart Prize nominee. His work appears in print worldwide, including Crab Creek Review, Arts & Letters, Cagibi, and Blue Mountain Review, among other publications. The 2012 winner of the Red Mountain Press National Poetry Prize and a recipient of the Gold Medal from the Scholastic Arts & Writing Awards, Kluckman has authored three poetry collections: The Animals in Our Flesh (Red Mountain Press, 2012), Some of It is Muscle (Swimming with Elephants Publications, 2013) and Rearview Funhouse (Eyewear Publishing, 2022).
