Christ Born Silent
“Why isn’t he crying?”
I look up to the Angel her sleeves rolled back
Covered in my fluids
Thousands of drops coat her fingers
My blood the brightest, cakes her pale hands,
The hands holding my son
He’s not the glass doll in the nativity set
He’s limp
Silent
Silent night, holy night
She looks up with blue eyed horror
This is not the perfect scene
He was supposed to be loud, hungry and gorgeous
I look as she takes a single white nail and cuts the cord
One swipe we are no longer one
The boy I screamed to hold
He didn’t scream back
Silent night, holy night
She rushes away holding him
Like if she doesn’t cradle his neck and back He might fall in two
That’s when it started, my sobs
The need to stand up
I was bleeding, split in two
I tried to stand and cried like a dog hit by it’s owners truck
Shock and need to get away, away, away
Joseph wrapped me in his arms
To comfort me?
No, to keep me still
Pin the weeping cow as her calf
is ripped toward the meat drawer
Next to me in the dirty broken barn
The donkey’s ears twitch
Eyes wide as it lets out a quiet huff
I knew she was a Jill
In her eyes was a mother
who’s waited like me before
Silent night, holy night
The Angel shook
I could hear her teeth chatter
God didn’t prepare her for a dead savior
Her wings were tall
making a white feathery wall
Blocking me from my boy
I hate her
She delivered my son
She’s saving my son
She’s here to protect us and I hate her
If he doesn’t live
What am I?
A game
Nine months of pain
Morning sickness
Feet swollen into hooves
Tears fat and stupid
I was a dancing fool
The bells ringing above my head
I thought it confirmation he was with me
All it had been was a jester’s hat
Hot tears rolled down my cheeks
I pushed myself away from Joseph
who loved me through everything
My pretty saintly bullshit became his
I was an idiot
I hate god
Give me my son
I’m not asking I’m telling
Don’t let him be a painful transaction
Don’t let him die in a crash he didn’t cause
Don’t make me the foolish dancing monkey
I was fourteen dammit when you asked me
Of course I’d say yes
How dare you
How fucking dare you take my boy
My beautiful sweet, gorgeous, giving, dead, dead, dead-
A single long cry that made my aching core sew itself together
My tears felt like foreign objects on my skin
I didn’t know why they’d be there when’s he’s here
The Angel holds him like a precious thing
A holy thing
A gorgeous gorgeous thing
All mine to love and hold
She sets him in my arms
one hand on his neck the other on his back
I grin like a fool
He’s covered in the filth from my body
I lay a hand on his naked chest his heart beating
It’s gonna run dry one day
To bleed away all wrongs and make all rights
as gorgeous as him
But right now he’s making little squeaks
Tiny confused cries
And when he latches onto my chest I feel him feed
His crying stops
It’s a silent night, a holy night
That’s when I understand why the whole world sings
Red Tag
The old rancher’s chopped, buttery voice hummed as he told me my task for the day. “Tag the youngins’. Green tag’s good for breeding, yellow tag’s alright, and red for meat.” It was a simple task, yet it still made my heart ache.
There was eight calves in all. Three boys, five girls. He’d told me all the tricks to tell which one’s would be good but I can’t pick. I’m a rancher. Trying to be at least. I’ve shot deer and ran a knife between their skin and muscle. I’ve gutted pigs, watching their entrails hit the ground like a clumsy child. I know violence and I know death. Meat cows make hamburgers and I can’t lie, I love me a good steak. I ain’t just a ranchin’ man; I’m a smart man so I know this I swear.
That still don’t stop my hands from trembling for each calf I walk up on. One with grayish white fur and big black eyes won’t stop staring right at me no matter where I go. Even when I’m with the other calves, his eyes track me like he knows. He knows he has his father’s strong muscle and lily white fur. He knows he’s safe, but that his sister gets sores easy and screams all day and all night. He watches me place a red tag on her ear, and for an animal that can’t see much color or feel much emotion, I see his tiny heart break.
When I finally get to him he lets out a low moo of greeting as I reach him in the silver cage. “Yeah, yeah I know. I hate this too.” I look him over feeling the muscle in his legs and remembering how he’s the only calf to never get sick with nothing. I reach for a green tag but even in his knowing eyes, this don’t please him. “Chin up you lil’ thing you’re gonna live a long life of green pastures and lots and lots of babies.”
His moo echoes in the barn as I clip his ear and the more I shush him the more it ticks him off. When I’m done, I rub the top of his head which only ticks him off more. He tears his head back chomping down on my finger in the process. I swing back my hand into a fist on instinct. An instinct I never have and never will use. My hands fall to my side, my fingers shaking against my jeans.
When I was little my momma always said I couldn’t hurt a fly. She’d laugh when I said I wanted to own a ranch. “Now Riley you know ranchers kill things by trade.”
I’d always respond the same way, my boyish southern drawl sounding like chicken scratch personified into speech. “I know momma, but you gotta help it live first. That’s gon’ be my favorite part. Watching it grow up cause of me.”
I stare at him, the green tag bobbing up and down as he shudders his ear trying to wave it off and shake my head. “You’re gonna live a long ass life and when you’re old and stubborn, you’re gonna drop dead.” I look over to the sister of his who was born on the same day from the same father. She has speckles of chestnut running up her legs and haunches that are covered in sores. Her nose is runny from a cold she couldn’t shake from birth, her eyes wet from the constant pain of being alive. “I don’t know what he got planned for you two, but I know if he’s a god who wants any of my prayers you’ll see that little girl running like the day she’s born when he decided to take you from your body.”
I reach out to pat his head again, the malicious look on his baby face gone. I never met a cow who could speak a lick of English, but something in his body knows what I’m saying. He can taste a long easy life like the ball of hay in his lips were replaced with sugar cubes and dew drops.
As I go to leave, I stop as I see the old man hunched over in the doorway to the barn. “You did as I said?” He asked his body a curled over shadow like a comma blocking out the evening sun.
“Yes sir. Eight calves were tagged three green, three yellow, two red.”
He nods slowly, his short frame coming closer into view. His plaid button up has holes in the bottom that never have and never will be mended. He’s a white man with dark leathery skin that has more creases than a crumpled piece of paper. As he gets closer, his soil colored eyes look through thick eyebrows up at me. “Good. They’ll all be grown enough in about three months and the truck’ll be here to grab them then.”
I try to be neutral. Nod my head and not give a damn. I really, really try. I don’t know if it was the widening of my eyes, the crease of my eyebrows, or the tiny downward slight of my lips. Something small and useless no one but that old man would notice.
“You named them didn’t you?”
“What!”
“Don’t play stupid; you heard me, boy.” He gets closer to me, his eyes staring through mine straight to my whirring brain. “Did you name them?”
I look down, my chest full with heavy guilt. “Yes.”
“What’d you name the two headed to the meat truck?”
I walk backwards so he can get a visual. I point to the boy who I chose for the meat truck, his fur pitch black with huge bug eyes. “I named him Soldier cause he looks like he just got back from Vietnam. How big his eyes are and all.” I keep walking until I get to the little girl, her ear trying to twitch off the tag like she knows what it means. “And I named her Lucky cause I think she’s anything but.”
I look to the older farmer expecting him to smack me upside the head and call me an idiot. Instead when I look to him, his eyes have this begrudging softness I’ve never seen in him. “You know the difference between my job and some company that sticks a thousand cows in a warehouse?”
I shake my head and he leans his old tired body on the gate keeping the cows in, it letting out an ancient creak as he does. “They know what care feels like. I had it when I first got this ranch from my father. I was a little older than you but I was just like you. I’d give em’ names. I’d pat their head and talk to them about my day. I had that and I’ve lost it. It ain’t a bad thing boy, but it’s a tiring thing.”
“What are you saying exactly?”
“I’m saying hold onto it as long as you can. The longer you have that, the more human you’ll be when your maker calls you home.”