How It Came to Be

By John McCarthy

It all went to hell when the goats came out corkscrewed

     and killed their mother. Those kids had to be fed wheat

through the chicken-wire pen. Brett’s step-dad watched them

     gnaw the stems with their lopsided jaw lines,

and he wondered if some things are better off dead.

     Brett’s step-dad didn’t know how to name his heartbreak,

so, in his garage, he cursed a plastic bag over his head

     and left the car running. By the time we found him,

it was late, but not late enough to say his name and heaven

     in the same sentence. Now, he sits in a fluorescent home

with his lips drooped to one side, like a fish with a thumb

     pinching its mouth, begging, in silence, for his old life back.

At night, his nurse washes her hands and talks to herself,

     letting privacy lead her to mutter her own truths:

You sad man, now why’d you go and do a thing like that?

About the Author

John McCarthy is the author of Scared Violent Like Horses (Milkweed Editions), which won the Jake Adam York Prize. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in 32 Poems, Alaska Quarterly Review, Best New Poets, Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, Gettysburg Review, Ninth Letter, North American Review, Pleiades, Quarterly West, and TriQuarterly. John is the Managing Editor of RHINO.