From the Rocking Chair on the Front Porch of an Airbnb in Belgrade, Montana
The heaviness here isn’t from the clouds,
low and ponderous as grief,
or the dark Bridger Mountains crouched below them.
It’s not from the vegetable garden with its overripe tomatoes
and cucumbers whose skin carries their own hurt.
It’s something about the goats.
When I go to see them, they rush
to the side of the pen where I stand:
two pygmy goats with swollen teats,
an obese billy with a scar on its face,
a goat that hobbles, its left hind leg
tucked beneath its body.
And there’s the goat with no horns,
only a knob on one side of its head
and on the other, a stub—beige, dried, twisted.
Here, in this sanctuary of the maimed and gentle,
the hornless goat’s wide-set eyes
and rectangular morse-code-dash pupils
fix on me. Then, a series of slow blinks,
like it’s batting out a message. I’d say
the goat is trying to tell me something.
Maybe it’s about its mangled horn stub,
or about compassion. Or about how
to go on living with injury.
This beloved creature.
But listen, perhaps I’m being foolish,
and my friend on the porch is calling me to look up.
The sunset is staggering.
ROBIN ROSEN CHANG is a 2023 New Jersey Council on the Arts poetry fellow and the author of The Curator’s Notes (Terrapin Books). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, New Ohio Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Plume, The Journal, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. She has an MFA from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
Read more by Robin Rosen Chang
Author’s Website
Poem in Plume
Poem in Bear Review
Poem in The Cortland Review