I Was Bigfoot's Love Slave!

Abstract

I Was Bigfoot's Love Slave! Julia Thacker (bio) –Weekly World News We ate ants peeled from bark, a rain of plumswhen he rattled the trees. Lumbering. Shackled.He stripped me and I flew up, a wood moth on birch eyeing the girl below,her limbs spread five-point star. After, he offered jackrabbit on a spit, tinctures.I covered myself with fir branches. Mostly I was alone.I gave up counting the days, hair wilding on my legs, arm pits forested.Gagged on my own sour smell. While he sloshed through creeksand villages, I crawled along the thick moss floor, picked snow-capped mushrooms,pigweed, prickly lettuce. Tongue furry, teeth velveted, I learned to suck spearmint.In snow, he hollowed a deer, laid me inside the carcass.My dreams tasted of iron; antlers, a crown I wore lit with fire.Sometimes he took me along miles of hemlock and sequoia.Evenings, we crouched at wood's edge, spied the far lights. Later I was offered a heart-shaped swimming pool for my story.Did he make you do things? My throat clogged with birdsong. My mind, with leaves. [End Page 36] Julia Thacker Julia Thacker is the granddaughter of a Harlan County coal miner. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in AGNI, Little Star, The Massachusetts Review, Missouri Review, and others. She has held fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and the National Endowment for the Arts. Other honors include a Pushcart Prize and the Grolier Poetry Prize. She has taught creative writing at Radcliffe Seminars and Tufts University. Her book-length manuscript, The Winter Comb, was a runner-up for the 2019 Berkshire Prize from Tupelo Press. She lives in Arlington, Massachusetts. Copyright © 2020 Pleiades and Pleiades Press