Branding
Beyond the fence, the next farm over,
a roan cow and her newly hot-ironed baby
mow down the green summer blades.
By the backyard pool,
raw vyshyvanka patterns
Sergei’s bare calf,
crosshatched like burlap. His body continues
to stretch into collage:
a Converse star
nooked into his ankle,
a blue-yellowed trident
spanning his bicep.
War broke out months ago.
Today sun pierces down
and I cannonball.
A wave explodes,
light beams bulleting
through shards
as they fall to wet the earth.
Leaning back
in a patio chair,
swimming trunk strings
pulled taut,
Sergei swills Odessa
brandy and Coke,
not wanting water to damage
his fresh ink.
But I let water buoy
and invade me. I let pruning
needle its own design
on my otherwise artless skin.
By habit or accident I call him “Jacob,”
the first ink I knew him by.
Long before me, it smudged
next to adoption signatures
like a blackout tattoo, one he lasered off
after the invasion
to uncover the birth
name he now wears like a sleeve.
He forgives me with a laugh.
He knows that within this oasis
Odessa burns down
a throat, sweet and slow.
But beyond the fence, beyond the next farm over,
Odesa burns down.
Kyiv burns down.
A woman’s vyshyvanka pools,
ruddy with blood.
And here I splash
and a branded calf
rests in the heat,
flesh marked as if to say
Here’s some damage. Here’s some damage.
Lyuba
A steel fence cages hard-hatted contractors,
one mounted on a charging bulldozer,
as if aboard some elephant,
a mahout motioning to workers
to scurry from the thundering path.
I stand out of earshot
and call my father,
who talks of the summer heatwave,
of my sister’s house-hunting,
of how the market will never let up,
of the Cold War espionage novel he’s been writing for years;
talks, in passing, of the anniversary of his father’s death
and of old Nat Geo articles
on mummified baby mammoths
found in Siberia.
A hunter and his sons
discovered one mammoth in 2007, he tells me,
only for a cousin to steal it
in the interest of prospective buyers.
With luck, they recovered the carcass on display
outside a village storefront,
still pristine
apart from ear and tail
gnawed to twine by dogs.
They named the calf “Lyuba,”
Russian for “beloved.”
Officials determined she suffocated
while her herd crossed a muddy river,
her body pickled by ice and mire;
her mother’s milk, still puddled in her belly
when they thawed her hide
from clinging permafrost.
Russians bear their winters, Dad reminds me,
that much is certain,
but even snow-plodding behemoths
couldn’t answer their children
if the cries were garbled with shit.
Dad forgets nothing
on this day—
how my grandfather’s back
pressed against a garden fence
overlooking his backyard gravel lot,
iced bottle of Russian Standard
shaking like a rattle in his fist;
how Oatmeal, that old blue heeler,
lapped up sweat from sallow ridges
in his wrinkled fingertips;
how, in his last moments,
milkweed curled
around his ulcerated stomach
collapsed forward
on the rocks.
Dad whispers now—
visit soon, be safe—
then buries the conversation.
And watching excavators graze
land down to trenches,
shovel-trunks ladling out deep ochre,
I wonder:
perhaps men,
even with their silent, glacial language,
could again unearth
underneath them
some tusked and crumpled shape,
long preserved in its damage,
and dare to name it love.
Thomas “Thom” Bowling (he/him), is a Kentucky poet born and raised in Louisville. He is an MFA student at EKU’s Bluegrass Writers Studio (BGWS) with plans to graduate fall of 2024. He lives in central Kentucky with my best friend and too many books. He loves dogs but spends too much time writing, working, watching old movies, and trying to win Thursday trivia nights with friends to have time for one.
Pegasus 
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