Daniel Cowper
Feast Behind the Waste Transfer Depot
Poly tents smeared like old shower curtains
shelter pens of cinderblocks and machines
for sorting plastics, cardboard, paper, glass jars, tins.
A road leads through encircling hemlocks
where blade-billed ravens alight and lean
down to watch our truck arrive. The flock’s
ecstatic flight-paths bend like boughs; throats
clack dear and fear as truces between clans
collapse in raucous skirmishes and routs.
From rusting bin-rims, the silver-faced, snakelike
eagles watch with telescopic lenses
as we unload roadkill. Cleft hooves click
over the tailgate of the truck. We half-lift,
half-skid the stiffened deer across the lane
to flop through ferns on a sour-scented drift
of old bones and fur. A feral dog exits her den,
freezes. Waits for us to back away. Her limbs
twitch as if whipped as she skitters to our midden.
Hunters once threw cuts from fresh kills aside
to pay for the ravens’ watchful silence —
to prove we killers are all on the same side.
Now we’re reunited by bad luck. A phone pinged —
the driver took too sticky a glimpse
at his lit screen — braked late. A leaping thing
smashed off the jeep’s dimpling steel — a maimed
deer levered on broken joints, the flints
of its hooves slipping uselessly in blood. Mom?
children called from the back seat. What happened?
Dad? Will it be all right?
In sunless labyrinths
minute ants stir. The happy stray to her den
returns. Complaining, peevish ravens groan
as eagles claim their turn. Grey light glints
on beetle shells, wet meat. It is a feast; a ruin.
Daniel Cowper lives on an island off the west coast of Canada, with his wife and their two sons. His writing has appeared in publications in Canada, the USA, Ireland, and the UK. New poems are forthcoming in
The Windhover and
This Magazine. He is the author of a poetry chapbook,
The God of Doors, which won the Frog Hollow Chapbook Contest, a book of poetry,
Grotesque Tenderness, and a verse novel,
Kingdom of the Clock, which is forthcoming in 2025.