"Next Door" by Brad Richard

Brad Richard | In Place | Seven Kitchens Press | 2022 | 39 Pages

A woman checks her chicken coop at dawn
then posts the horror that she found: “Headless. 

They were murdered.” Cue the neighborhood chorus: 
“What psycho does this?”     “Coyotes?”     “Rats.” 

“Racoons?”     “A bluejay.”     “Coyotes?”     “Decapitation 
means someone, not something.”     “Racoons will yank 

birds’ heads through chicken wire and chew them off. 
Chickens have a gland they like.”     “My money’s 

on coyotes.”    “A sad state of affairs: 
if one of us took personal responsibility 

and shot a suspect creature, the police 
would not applaud our reenactment

of Atticus Finch’s honorable deed.” 
“I saw two on South Galvez last night.”     

“One dark, one tan? Our porch camera caught them.” 
Embedded in the growing thread, the clip plays 

that loose-limbed trot, those down-sweeping tails,
their hurry to leave that harshly lit street. 

“Free-roaming outlaw beasts.”     “Last week in Chicago, 
one killed a child by a nature museum. A child!”     

“I’m hoping they stick around long enough
to cross paths with some window-smashers 

and handle-pullers.”     “That 
would be justice served.”

From In Place by Brad Richard. Reprinted by permission of Seven Kitchens Press. © 2022 Brad Richard.

Brad Richard is the author of four collections of poetry: Habitations, Motion Studies (winner of the 2010 Washington Prize, finalist for the 2012 Thom Gunn Award), Butcher’s Sugar, and Parasite Kingdom (winner of the 2018 Tenth Gate Prize). His poems, reviews, and interviews have appeared or are forthcoming in many journals, including American Letters & Commentary, Barrow Street, The Cortland Review, The Gettysburg Review, Guernica, Green Mountains Review, The Laurel Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Nervous Breakdown, Okey-Panky, Sakura Review, and Xavier Review. A 2015 Louisiana Artist of the Year and 2002 winner of the Poets & Writers Exchange Award in Poetry, he taught creative writing to talented high school students in New Orleans for twenty-eight years. A faculty member of the Kenyon Review Summer Workshops and an independent teacher and editor, he lives and writes in New Orleans.