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Writer's pictureTattoo Magazine

(SPRING 2021) An Inevitable Future | Megan Rudberg

Updated: Jan 20, 2022

The countryside stinks of cow hide, manure, and discontented fatherhood

Great big waves of blonde grain, deceivingly plush, drink up the earth

And the cows chew their cud in a dull synchronicity


Clouds laze across the dusky pink sky in popcorned patterns

And the young man and his girl walk alongside the fields,

Crisp starched arm locked in her calico creased elbow

The heels of his boots strike the earth as she pads gently,


Hair trapped beneath a scarf


Her eyes bear a sadness, deep like the roots of a neuron branching into her collar, her heart, her lungs,

More acidic than her own roiling stomach (despite the indigestion)


It speaks of a future with the parrotfish ladies who flutter their fins, their tails,

Clucking their beaks into the void of their stagnant briny pool


In foggy glass bottles of rose water,

Dyed pink with carmine that stains angry lace antimacassars and permeates stale cotton bedsheets,

Drowning in this congealed gel ten years past expiry


Laying to sleep at night as the boa constrictor, smooth and glossy, muscles its way across the room,

Beady eyes flicking to spot dust on the floors, a dead housefly on the bookshelf

It punishes her with a hearty shriek and a stab of the elusive tongue

That tastes of herbs and roast chicken dinner, knives on the table


Done up in trussing like a pig for pork,

Legs twitching like the old man’s eye while the blood rushes to its head.

Squealing until its throat gets slit in a spurt of scarlet

Reminiscent of the mousey school teacher’s patent leather shoes


They squealed, too she remembers solemnly


The young man’s arm moves and his heat dissipates from her own

She squirms as he laces his fingers with hers,

Pressing the sharp edges of her engagement ring into her knobby fingers


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