John Shoptaw
Brutality
In this corner a he-man, bare-chested,
winking at the women. In that, a brute fact,
isolated, unexplained, a she-bear —
her non-retractable claws (if she still had them)
gloved in red; her sublime growl
muzzled in her throat; her neck,
its brown bristles chafed by a thick
leather leash, passed through an overhead pulley,
which would snatch her from the jaws
of defeat or victory into her next match.
Her murky eyes, though, were free
to roam or roll. If I dared to look into them,
from as far back as today, what would I find?
Not brutality.
No lack of reason akin to insanity
in her failure to grasp why
she could never either eat or be eaten.
Nor an unrelenting cruelty in her soft gaze,
which robbed us of a hateful target
and rubbed our noses in our steaming frenzy —
not only the sweating carnies and hooting crowd
but squeamish me, my date squeezing my arm,
the pair of us rooting wordlessly against our kind
for the she-bear to pummel that hairy bully.
I’m not sure what, but I do think I'd find —
What’s the word? — an imbrutality in her
not being able to stand to look at us.
about the author
John Shoptaw’s new collection, Near-Earth Object, will be published by Unbound Edition Press, with a foreword by Jenny Odell, in April 2024. He teaches poetry and ecopoetics in the English Department at UC Berkeley.