Free Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals by Patricia Lockwood Page A

Animorph Enters the Doggie-Dog World
    Discover the power at age eleven. Discover all powers
    at age eleven. A kittenhead struggles out of your face
    and the kittenhead mews MILK, you gasp with its
    mouth and it slurps itself back. Yet the mew for MILK
    remains, you drink it. You think, “I am an Animorph.”
    Your sight and your hearing increase, like wheat
    and the wind in the wheat. Well you’ve never seen
    any wheat but it sounds good, to you and your new
    trembling ears. Blue sky increases above the wheat
    and you know what it’s like to grow a . . . well.
    A hawk’s is between two legs but much higher.
    Halfway to any animal is where you like
    to be. Get halfway there and have just the instinct,
    the instinct that someone’s approaching. Stripes
    begin to form, are always a surprise, you look
    down and you move your head left to right and then
    the meaning comes. English get worse but not much
    in your muzzle, English get worse but not much
    in your mouth. You walk to school and sit next
    to a girl who was born with a tail and you copy off
    her. You rub your temples when they ache, rub any
    of your body when it aches, you seem to be only
    a series of places where animal parts could emerge.
    Soon you will be a teenager, and soon you will be
    so greasy, and how you can hardly wait, because:
    its grease makes the animal graceful, and go. You go
    to the petting zoo with your class and timidly reach
    in a hand. Turn to a donkey and finally
    feel your lashes are long enough. Turn to a horse
    and finally feel that your eyes are so meltingly human.
    Walk home on your own through the fields and the fields,
    and the increase of wheat and the wind in it, and think
    of the life that stretches before you: work your way
    through all the animals, and come to the end of them,
    and what? And turn to crickets, and make no noise?
    One tear struggles out of your face, but no that’s not
    a tear. “I fuckin eat crickets,” your kittenhead says,
    â€œI fuckin eat silence of crickets for fun. I got life after
    life and a name like Baby. Every time I try to cry a tear
    a new kittenhead grows out of me.” And oh how you
    are lifted, then,
    the kittenhead of you in the high hawk hold.

The Hatfields and McCoys
    I am waiting for the day when the Hatfields
    and McCoys finally become interesting to me,
    when they flare with significance at last as if
    they’d been written in Early Times Whiskey
    and the match of my sight had been flicked
    and was racing now along them, and racing
    like a line to their houses—who wasted
    all this whiskey, and now everything is lit up:
    how they hid behind trunks of oaks, and hid
    behind herds of cows, how they aimed like teats
    at each other and shot death in a straight white
    line; I will learn how it began, probably over
    a . . .
gal
, or McCoy gave a Hatfield an unfair
    grade for a paper about mammals he worked
    really hard on, and his dad to whom grades
    were life and death kindled a torch in the night,
    and burned her grading hand to ashes along
    with all the rest of her, but her name McCoy
    escaped from the fire and woke up in seven
    brothers. I will learn how
    their underdrawers fought each other while
    hanging on the line, how socks disappeared
    from their pairs, how new mailmen were killed
    every day touching poisoned postcards they sent
    to each other, which said things like Wish you
    WERENT
here, and
GOODBYE
from sunny Spain,
    I will learn precise numbers of people who died
    and where they put all the bodies, under the garden
    maybe, where they helped grow blood-red carrots
    that longed to lodge in enemy throats,
    where they helped grow brooding tomatoes
    that were still considered deadly back then, as part
    of the nightshade family. Two of their babies
    fell in love, because love comes earlier for people
    who live in the past and the mountains,
    and when they turned one year old
    they were told they were Hatfields and McCoys,
    and one