Eureka Series: TOOL-USING ANIMALS
Mary Peelen
Listen to Mary Peelen read “TOOL-USING ANIMALS”:
TOOL-USING ANIMALS
A single vacant lot was wilderness
to us then. End of summer,
a gleaning. We, the gatherers, good
girls of our mothers, we
hunted in the grassy circumference
around a tree, tall
as the pylons across the road.
We took what we could bear—
great stores of hickory nuts
hauled by the bagful,
tough brown paper
doubled against the weight.
Back home, blocks away, we
dumped our sacks of swag
on the concrete drive, scavenged
tools from the back of the garage:
pliers for ripping thick green husks
and a huge iron claw hammer
painted red on one end. We’d
raise it high overhead and
take a swing like a dare
smashing naked nutcases,
shells flying into smithereens,
oily brown hickory-ink bleeding
like a wound, staining our skin, finger-
nails, blue jeans, the concrete. Feral,
exhilarated, we sorted shrapnel,
scavenging for nutmeat
as animals do in annual cycles.
We gorged ourselves, while
inside, wrist-deep, our mothers
kneaded onion soup-mix into bowls
of ground chuck, meatloaf for dinner
again. They opened cans of corn and peas
while watching TV—the bombing of
Hanoi. Nuclear tests at a site in Nevada.
Copyright © 2024 Mary Peelen All rights reserved
from Colorado Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permissionMary Peelen is the author of Quantum Heresies, winner of the Kithara Book Prize. Her writing has appeared in Massachusetts Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Alaska Quarterly Review, Poetry Review (UK), and elsewhere. She lives in San Francisco and Paris.
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