Three Chores, One Country Day 1

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Three Chores, One Country Day Greenhorn, tenderfoot of twelve, my legs felt bare against the slopping trough the squealing hogs nosed up, their muddy jaws like snout-machines cold-vacuuming my socks, grunting up my bite-sized trousers, drooling for anything from bitter ash to millet-sorghum, sniffing red-eyed on my sloshy pails, rushing me as if I didn't know the king might come, upset us all: our boar on loan to Farmer Krejci, broken loose, driven through the fence by unpredicted hungers, his bristles riding from his unslit ballbag up to his plowshare tusks intent on rooting back until our corncob signals scattered up the lane led him past barn-gate heaps to the slopping place where cracklings of his split-foot trot ruled all the air— snappings, different, somehow like the very noise now suddenly upon us: hearing it, the smacking rows of snouts swung up in unison like drums about to beat, the pigpen silence momentary as an exit gate about to close. My arms jumped forward, but my legs stood still, dug in where the sound was rattling, crescendo in my eyes that caught my bucket raging back and forth, the squeals inside it churning terror through the pig's head wrestling there, trapped too deep in slop to batter itself free, whirling cornhusk storms from pigsty blow to blow, from trough to tree stump to boulders at the gate. The dumb-eyed audience hardly let me through to save him, cornered blind, frothing resistance down his bucket jaw I grabbed, falling thrown into the shitty mud by his breaking free, his snorting pigdamnations, his backward bucking to the gate I had left ajar. Loath to brush me, my filthy hands had nothing else to do but grip the one-way path that led from chore to chore; contd

Full description

Poem written by Emanuel in 1979/1980 detailing everyday chores of living in the rural Midwest in the United States, while simultaneously alluding to the trauma of slavery. (Page 1)

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  • type
    Image
  • created on
  • file format
    jpg
  • file size
    872 kB
  • container title
    James A. Emanuel Papers
  • creator
    James A. Emanuel
  • issue
    BOX 4 FOLDER 26, "The Chopping Block (Selected Poems)," draft 1988 (1 of 2)
  • rights
    James A. Emanuel Estate
  • rights holder
    James A. Emanuel Estate
  • version
    1979/1980