Son, Forsaken, by McKinley Johnson

The Prodigal Son, by Auguste Rodin (France) before 1917. Patrick, CC BY-SA 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Son, Forsaken

The boy stumbles into the barn, slams the wooden lock bar in place behind him. Mud and cow shit cover his bare feet, his threadworn jeans, his house shirt. He tears the clothes from himself, hurls himself onto the packed dirt floor, writhing; kicks, throws fists around him. Dust and hay and loose fur cling to the drench and dirt of him. His parents' words, the disordered parade of his heart, the waking panic of penned livestock fill the staccato space between his sobs. His heel cracks against metal, sends tools from the wall down onto his body, onto the ground beside him. A sharp stone or a rake catches the soft flesh of his inner thigh, splits him to his hip, up his belly. He stands. Syrupy blood begins to run down the ridges of him, covers his dick, streams down his calf, deltas between his toes. He feels his way further into the fuzzy brown of the unlit barn. Admonishments, spots of white pulse through the dark in front of him. His nose fills with the scent of iron, piss, grease. Splinters snag in his palms as he drags them along the rough-hewn beams. He falls again, spits out straw, and moves unsteady to his knees. He lifts his arms. The bleating and bray of the goats, the ass; the skittering of hooves.

McKinley Johnson

McKinley Johnson (he/him) is a poet from the foothills of Appalachia. He is an MFA student in Poetry at George Mason University, the assistant poetry editor of phoebe, and a teaching fellow for Poetry Alive!. His work can be found in the North Carolina Poetry Society’s Award Anthology Pinesong, Neologism Poetry Journal, Carolina Muse, and elsewhere.