Raleigh Review
501(c)(3) Nonprofit 
EIN: 27-2644341
ISSN: 2169-3943​ 
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Blood Sausage
by Lindsay Wilson

First, she says, put a shine to the knife’s edge,
              find your eyes along the gut hook’s

sharp reflection,
                               find the wheelbarrow

beside the rock pile, find the path to the back
knuckled pasture, where we keep the kids feral,

letting them say goat all day. Before you aim
through the horns and down

               so that the bullet unhinges the maw
into its broken-toothed wound,

make sure to stake the hounds to leash.

Before you slit the throat
                                      above the draining bucket,

rope the hind legs in their last kicks
from the limbs of the budding cottonwood,

and then prepare yourself for how much blood
will leave the kid.
                                Do not waste it.

To keep it smooth, untroubled, stir in a long
throat full of burgundy. The dogs will taste
 
                the spiced-blood air then bay
and pull on hunger’s leashes.

From where you stand, knife in hand
dripping from a throat,

                                       the loud hounds will look
 like red flecks against spring’s young, green grasses.