Flynn, Rachel Contreni

United States, (b. 1969)

Hunger for Something Easier

  1. I suppose now you’ll deny it all:
  2.  
  3. there was no wild pig in the woods,
  4. hair up on his back like barbed wire,
  5. eyes sunk and runny in crusted tunnels
  6. along the snout. And we didn’t run
  7. through red brambles, banging our legs
  8. against stumps until we flung ourselves
  9. into the thorny arms of an apple tree.
  10. You’ll say we didn’t stay shoved up
  11. against the bark breathing bright spice
  12. and pitching green fruit to frighten away
  13. the pig. You’ll never say you were afraid
  14. or that I held you and you held me
  15. and we crouched on the thin branches
  16. until night slunk in, and a hunger
  17. for something easier turned the pig away.

© Rachel Contreni Flynn. Tongue. Los Angeles: Red Hen Press (2010).

About the Poet:

Rachel Contreni Flynn, United States, (b. 1969) is a poet, lawyer, editor, community arts leader and educator. Rachel Contreni Flynn was born in Paris in 1969 and raised in a small farming town in Indiana. She got her BA from Indiana University in Bloomington where she majored in journalism and history. She received her MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson College in 2001.

Her first book, Ice, Mouth, Song, was selected by Stephen Dunn as the 2003 winner of the Dorset Prize. She has recorded her work for the Bloomington/Normal Public Radio station, been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and was featured as The Spoon River Review’s Illinois Poet in 2005. She also received an Illinois Arts Council Artists Fellowship.

Flynn works at Fortune Brands, Inc., a Fortune 500 consumer products company. She teaches poetry courses and workshops occasionally and lives in Mundelein, Illinois. [DES-09/19]

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