Michael Loderstedt

Wild Goat Hunt

I.

Take the tiller & bring us
up close, Junior said,
as I steered skiff
toward Goat Island that
crisp first Saturday
of November.

On the leeward side
of a high dune ridge
lay the wild herd, sunning
on bright sand. Junior
crouched low & leveled
single-shot .22, elbow
braced against
gunwale.

When the rifle cracked
kids & nanny scatter,
the billy bucked high
into the air, shaking
that bullet laid
just behind
his ear.

Junior dragged muddy ram
by curled horns through
marsh grass, placed head
upon thwart, tongue
lolling, we stared
at sticky barefeet
caked-red with
goat’s blood. 

II.

That night embers licked
the sky from rusty-halved
barrel, the goat quartered
mopped with vinegar
& red pepper flakes.
Smell of charred meat
hanging on
night air.

We pull the stringy
flesh to our mouths,
hot & briny. Junior’s Cherokee
mother is stomp dancing
on bare plywood sheet
to Hank’s Good bye
Joe, we gotta’ go
me-oh-my-oh.

We’ll sip the last Stroh’s
& take our smoke back
under live oaks, wipe
grease from chins, praise
Junior’s dead aim, pass
goat horns tacked
to his shed door.

Michael Loderstedt is nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2022 for his poem Why We Fished, which also won the Applewhite Poetry Prize from the NC Literary Review. He has work forthcoming in Bangalore Review, and Musepaper. He has also had poems published in a recent anthology entitled neighborhood Voices (Literary Cleveland/Cleveland Public Library) and received an Ohio Arts Council Fellowship in Literature in 2020.