print previewback MATTHEW MINICUCCI
Goat
Peyton, CO
The field holds nothing but her and everything else. I stopped and sang a song about what the ocean looks like in winter; words that hid in bulrushes, and sat unused and unseen in heavy reeds. My breath tore down these rotted fences. My hands built a stage of box elder and I danced on the brittle proscenium. Piety was the first word of my hymn, and sting was the last. My father’s face was somewhere in between. I called the song ruminant and waited to choke on the echo. I called it tragedy, tragoidia: song that slips from the curved neck of this beast as she sips alfalfa like rainwater. But no attention was paid to me. She only ate and glanced for a moment before walking away. The white strings of her coat danced like Sanctus bells, honoring goat-killing Dionysus more than any chorus’s dithyramb could. 
