A Living Giant Squid
My grandfather doesn't say muchabout the war, except that it was his job to pullthe bodies, dead for three days& rotting on shore, into sacks & stack them;& that to him the corpses smelledlike chocolate; & that once when he yankedon an arm, the arm came loose,tugged free from its body; & that now, when he watchesa documentary where a team capturesa living giant squid for the first time on cameraby firing off the sub's bow a cloudof pulverized, lesser squid & the narrator remarksit doesn't take longfor the dead to summon the living, that the narrator is wrong.
Feature Date
- October 12, 2019
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Copyright © 2019 by Jacques J. Rancourt
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Jacques J. Rancourt was raised in rural Maine. He is the author of Brocken Spectre (forthcoming from Alice James Books in 2021), Novena (Pleiades Press, 2017), and the chapbook, In the Time of PrEP (Beloit Poetry Journal, 2018). His poems have appeared in the Boston Review, Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, Missouri Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Best New Poets, among others. He has held poetry fellowships and scholarships from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Stanford University where he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow. He currently lives in San Francisco where he works as a middle school principal.
Vol. 25 No. 2
Evansville, Indiana
University of Southern Indiana
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Ron Mitchell
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The Southern Indiana Review presents a cross-section of emerging and established artists and writers whose work is both regional and national in scope and degree of recognition. With the support of the Indiana Arts Commission and National Endowment for the Arts, SIR is published in October and May by the University of Southern Indiana and sponsored by the College of Liberal Arts.
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