Christian Paulisich
It was far too hot in that barn
with billy goats and ducks,
teacup pigs and humans to tell
just how many men had fingered
condoms in their pockets, tractor keys,
and tickets with their scalloped edges
like cut up paper people; how many
first kisses were to be had on the Ferris wheel,
seats sticky with vanilla ice cream, just how
many eyes were fixed on
the cow giving birth;
how long it would take
until the blood from her vulva
was erased. In middle school I watched
a woman give birth, a miracle, they said,
which didn’t seem miraculous at all
but a plan, an act of desire, heady
exchange of spit and sweat and heat
in which a couple had
completed an assignment
together. Back in the barn,
my boyfriend covered his eyes.
Brown streaks of mucus fell on the hay
as the sow expelled the calf, a slick
gelatinous corpus,
from what looked
like her anus.
As the barn door swung
behind, I felt her roar.
That primal, milky moan
between the long drawn
spurts of push and pull,
uterine muscle contraction
and release. To my boyfriend, her feces
seemed an obscene display
of labor. How could one
work so hard in this heat?
She didn’t even bother
the gap-toothed kids
in their goopy-eyed gawking.
I envied all their future
reproductions,
that slippery aspiration
which even then
I couldn’t hold.
Christian Paulisich graduated from Johns Hopkins University, where he worked on The Hopkins Review. He now works as a therapist in northern Maryland, but is originally from the Bay Area, California. He was chosen as an honorable mention for the 2024 Gulf Coast Prize for Poetry and a finalist for Frontier Poetry‘s 2024 Nature & Place Contest, and received a summer 2024 fellowship from Brooklyn Poets. He has published or forthcoming work in The Southeast Review, Salamander, Frontier, Literary Matters, Crab Orchard Review, Denver Quarterly, fourteen poems, and other magazines. He currently reads poetry submissions for Palette Poetry. Follow along at https://christianpaulisich.wixsite.com/christianpaulisichpo.