Alison Thumel

At the Predator Hunters Convention in Rifle, CO

So many outsides of things strung up at eye level.
I’ll admit I stared as if I could not.

The bar was closed, so we sipped root beers
and wandered between creatures that once hunted

and people who hunted them. What was I expecting?
Here, pelts dangling off a metal rack. Here,

fangs in a ceramic bowl. Two paws, crossed
and clawing each other prayerfully.

What should I have focused on instead—
the rodeo ring’s peeling gates, counting

from one to five? The tempo of the dirt
floor’s boot print pattern? The advertisement

for beef, which I am trying to eat less of?
I came to gawk. In a place like this,

I would never have held a girlfriend’s hand,
I think. I think this too: if I love him

why do I feel something in me running
when the hunter turns to the man beside me

and says, wouldn’t she look beautiful wrapped in this?
Draped in something that could kill—I hate myself

for this metaphor. For my instinct to flay
my insides only from the safety of a poem.

In the gun-themed town, I spent less than an hour.
In a poem, it is easy to claim vulnerability.

I wish I could say take all of me. The parts
that are safe and the parts that are dangerous

(my soft belly! my sharp dewclaws!) If I admit
I am more often unnoticed, I am not alone.

That conventional act. How easy it is to live
between assumption and clarification.

Like raising the barrel and taking aim
before the wolf even opens its mouth.