Saturday
Calvin Olsen (Boston University, USA)
.
.
Dad called me
out of the weeds
before it was hot.
He was on the porch,
balancing on his shovel
to pull on his boots.
He herded me inside
by the back of my head –
I was allowed to watch
from the window. He shrank
toward the barbed wire
separating our house
from the field that lapped
at Squaw Butte.
How did I know
how long it took?
Stopping at the grass line,
he took the shovel
in both hands
and speared the dirt
a few times.
A red bandana
fell out of his pocket
as he flung something
over the fence.
The first body uncoiled
in the air; the second
wobbled like a fat rope.
He looked back and motioned
for his water jar,
the screen door slapping
behind me on my way
to pick up the rattles
and skip the heads
like rocks in the ditch.
.
.
Calvin Olsen was born and raised in Idaho. He received a BA in English from Brigham Young University, and is currently finishing his MFA at Boston University. He recently returned from the Iberian Peninsula where he completed a translation project as a 2011 Robert Pinsky Global Fellow. He works as an editorial assistant at AGNI Magazine. He has work forthcoming in an anthology, Fire in the Pasture, and his writing has appeared in The Honeyland Review, Clarion, Cicada, and others.
