Assistant Editor Taylor Byas: On its surface, Jane Wayne’s “Branding Day” is a poem about humans’ capacity for cruelty: how easily we inflict pain onto animals, how readily we stand on the sidelines to watch. But really, this is poem about memory. Wayne reminds us that remembering always comes with the price of reliving the moment. When our bodies “capture one of those deep photographs / that fear takes in spite of us,” our own memories become brands, pressed and seared into our minds.
Branding Day
(at Quarter Circle H Ranch)
Only the cowboys entered the corral,
while a few summer girls perched along the wooden fence
to watch the men lasso each calf by the legs, then fling
it on its side like a bag of sand.
Such moaning then. It took two or three men to hold down
the kicking and bucking, but for all the writhing in the dust,
nothing would stay the iron or bander, nor as the shrieks intensified
did looking away from the strike spare the animal.
The men worked fast, one calf after another. And each time
before I recoiled, I might have seen blood, or something worse
in the dirt, but couldn’t be sure. Still, I was implicated,
forced to inhale the smoke––burnt hair and flesh––while
the frenzied struggle on the ground branded me. By the time
the men had finished their work, we had seen enough
to capture one of those deep photographs
that fear takes in spite of us.
In addition to four books of poetry, Jane O. Wayne’s work has previously appeared in issues of The Cincinnati Review, as well as Southern Poetry Review, Boulevard, Portland Review, Cave Wall, and Bellingham Review.
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