Poetry By MJ Huntsgood

Joseph Gage CC




you don’t play with your mother in the woods anymore

when your momma was the cannibal queen, my little starlit sky, we sang songs to the night and sucked the marrow from the bones of tiny femurs with such ferocity as to forgo the fragrant fields of fallen outsiders who had come to slay her. our nostrils were full of herbs that spiced the meat of our enemies and our bellies were always full and our minds sang of the old times and the new. we tasted so many flavors of so many people. oh, the men of the tall buildings called us wild, they called us strange, and their cloth---synthetic, that was the word they used---did not fray for us to cannibalize as well. we broke apart their strange objects and tried to make use of them, but they were so simple. little square blocks that meant everything to them but did nothing to save them. shiny and slick and sparked when we smashed them with rocks. they were clearly delusional, so we didn't eat their brains, though these were your mother's favorite parts to devour. your mother was very picky about the parts to eat. she touched their skin and could tell who had been tainted by the outside world, whose meat was no longer fit to be eaten and who had been poisoned by too much of that outside world. "no good," she would say. "flesh is bad." it wasn't even safe to feed to the chickens. if one of the chickens got too close to the blood and pecked at it, she would scuttle over and pick it up, snapping its neck off in a clean, unholy bite with her sharp, filed-down chompers.

oh, how i loved her.

you would have loved her, too, had you been old enough. you played in the woods. you sang in the trees. you didn’t see the things we did. but the forest isn't as large as it used to be, my starlit sky, but your eyes don't see that anymore. your eyes aren't the clouds of appalachia and the dirt roads of our home but you know we will never hurt you, not our light treasure. i’ll never understand why you want to leave, leave our little home, but i also didn't understand why they wanted to take your momma away, either. capital, that's what they said the offense was. will you learn what that is when you go out there, my starlit sky? don't come back here. the traps will be out and you'll need both of your legs out there, in the world of the prey. and maybe you'll see your momma

​

​
MJ Huntsgood writes the weird, the dark, and the uncanny. Once homeless, she survived on air mattresses and sheer stubbornness before clawing her way through a master’s degree and building a life of her own as a scientist.

Featured in such places as Timber Ghost Press and The Hooghly Review as well as anthologies for Macmillan, she has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and teaches writing for Montgomery County Writers.

She lives in an unreasonably haunted townhome in Washington, DC with her single surviving air plant, two cats, and trophy husband.