Two Poems from THE DREAM OF REASON

The Sleeping Pig

It is easy to love a pig in a nightgown. 
See how he sleeps, white flannel 
straining his neck at the neckhole. 
His body swells and then deflates.
The gown is nothing to be ashamed of, only 
the white clay of moonlight smeared 
over his hulk, original clothing, the milk 
of his loneliness. The flickering candle 
of a dream moves his warty eyelids. 
All sleeping things are children. 

The Traveling Line 

The sun on their backs is a stroke of burning gold.
They smell the bright dust of the yard.
The pigs are loaded onto trucks.
The pigs are prodded through a passage.
They roll their many eyes.
They see the hind legs of the one ahead.
They call to one another like birds.
The pigs become a traveling line.
Moving up the ramp the fever rises.
There is the clank of metal.
They hold still inside confusion.
A current passes through their bodies.
Blood comes from their mouths in strings.
By the ankles they are swiftly inverted.
Blood comes from their mouths in strings.
A current passes through their bodies.
They hold still inside confusion.
There is the clank of metal.
Moving up the ramp the fever rises.
The pigs become a traveling line.
They call to one another like birds.
They see the hind legs of the one ahead.
They roll their many eyes.
The pigs are prodded through a passage.
The pigs are loaded onto trucks.
They smell the bright dust of the yard.
The sun on their backs is a stroke of burning gold. 

Jenny George is the author of the collection The Dream of Reason (Copper Canyon, April 2018). The recipient of a 2015 “Discovery” / Boston Review Poetry Prize, Jenny George lives in Santa Fe, NM, where she has served as program coordinator since 2010 for Hidden Leaf, a Buddhist-based social justice foundation. Her poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Ploughshares, Narrative, Cimarron Review, The Collagist, Crab Orchard Review, FIELD, Inch, Indiana Review, and Shenandoah. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fund, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo Corporation. She holds a BA in Human Ecology and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.