Cate McGowan
Thanksgiving, Sunset
One boy down. Another in jail. Jessica, the neighbor’s fat
basset, rifles through my overturned trash cans and emerges,
clamps a turkey carcass. The dog shambles down the street’s
yellow line, slides the day’s zipper closed, disappears into
the cleavage of darkness at the dead end. A power easement
burrs with a blue intensity of propane torches and sacrificial steel.
Where’s the body? detectives ask. A girl points toward the woods,
and the cops aren’t surprised. The last of autumn departs; leaves
clench their fists, disintegrate, and the flecks dab my driveway.
These hopeless pastorals. Shit happens in suburban shadows,
subdivisions built atop haunted fields and gone farms, spots
where kids get up to trouble in carports and two-flat firetraps.
The gloaming’s fire fades to the sailor’s delight, and a bullet
shatters the back window. Jessica heads home.
Cate McGowan is an artist, critic, historian, poet, prose writer, and the author of four books. Her collection of poems, Sacrificial Steel, is forthcoming from Driftwood Press in 2025 and won their Editors’ Pick Poetry Prize. Brill will publish McGowan’s collection of memoir essays, Writing is Revision, in December 2024. Gold Wake Press published These Lowly Objects, McGowan’s novel, in 2020. And her short story collection, True Places Never Are (2015), won the Moon City Press Short Fiction Award in 2014 and was a finalist for the Lascaux Prize.
Cate’s poetry, essays, and stories have appeared in many literary outlets, including Norton’s Flash Fiction International, Glimmer Train, The North American Review, Stonecoast Review, Chestnut Review, Shenandoah, Citron Review, Crab Orchard Review, and Tahoma Literary Review.
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