issue 6
// poetry
Choosing the Bear
by Ava Mack
for Renée Nicole Macklin Good
The bear doesn’t call me fuckin’ bitch1 when it kills me.
The bear kills me and picks my bones clean.
You leave my body to rot.
The bear splits the G on pints of my blood.
You gag at my stout heart.
The bear returns me back to nature.
You keep me uncovered; you waste me.
The bear takes me into itself.
You wash your hands of me.
Let my death be a ripping into anonymity and a oneness.
Let the last thing I hear be a perfect roar.
Let not the last thing I see be the dead black eye of your gun
your face, covered
in shame.
If it is the last thing, let it be known that the bear killed me
and man murdered me.
- This line is inspired by a Threads post from @reclaimwithbrooke. ↩︎
about the author // Ava Mack
| Ava Mack (she/her) is poetry editor at The Lost Poetry Club and a reader for ONLY POEMS and Palette Poetry. She was the 2023 Poetry Fellow at The Writers’ Room of Boston. Her work has been published in Muleskinner Review, Free the Verse, Heimat Review, Pearl Press, EDGE CITY, thread litmag, The Indianapolis Review, Monterey Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She lives somewhere between Massachusetts and Rhode Island. |
Instagram: @avamariemack
Website
wildscape. literary journal 