"WHEN I SEE MYSELF...I WONDER WHAT'S INSIDE."

Big Black Pig

By Juan Fernando Viollagomez

(From The Acentos Review)

All the things my mother couldn’t have

I fit into my mouth.

Spoon by spoon,

the beans and corn, her

father’s death

the town ignored,

the homemade

feasts cooked

with dented cans of

meat and greens picked

up off the curb.

When I see myself in photographs

I wonder what’s inside.

Forgotten things

I’ve swallowed up

And let them work

inside of me. Running

thick against my veins

like water muddied

by the slippery soil

my mom got on her shoes

and dragged into the kitchen.

A heart coarsened like the second

skin my brother grew

of sand and desert heat,

which he later shed upon the bed we

shared and scratched me

while we slept.

It’s the thirty pounds

of dog dad mourns, or

his brother’s soul

that ran into

the woods and climbed

into a tree, the big, black pig

I saw a picture of

while she was still alive,

before my grandpa

carved her flesh

and fed it to his

children on the road.

It’s blood just like

the muddy river

running fast beneath the surface

calm. Its slippery bank has

face imprints where

children played in mud.

Their infant fossils

washed away

and buried in the sea.

(Juan Fernando Villagómez is a writer from Houston, TX. His work is forthcoming in the Cincinnati Review. He is a member of the Macondo community for writers, a recipient of the Crawley Research Grant, and a finalist for the 2021 Keene Prize for Literature. He is currently an MFA student in fiction at the University of Texas in Austin where he lives with his dog, Abba and two cats, Brick and Ghost.)