WHAT WE ARE GIVEN

To cut down on the number of coyotes

on his property, your father would soak

two-inch squares of sponge in bacon grease,

then litter them along the red dirt road.

He told you how they would stick in the intestines

of the animal, starving them from the inside out,

until one day, No more coyote. You could relate.

Their pepper coat, their eyes already glassy.

He didn’t have to watch them, so it was easier

for him to distance himself. This, his duty

to the land, its unplowed fields. How, even

then, you wanted to stray, but you were too

young. How even now, you can’t cook bacon

in the kitchen of your one-bedroom apartment

without thinking Maybe, this time, if I’m lucky,

it’ll kill me, too. Off the bed of his truck

he made you toss one, then another,

those little colorful squares were

a death sentence for the next blind hunger

who came along, who took of the soft meal

laid out before them, who didn’t know

what they were given until it was too late.

William Fargason's poetry appears in New England Review, Barrow Street, Indiana Review, Baltimore Review, New Orleans Review, and elsewhere.