BIO
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.
Big Black Pig
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.