Assistant Editor Lisa Low: Cristi Donoso Best’s “Caul” opens in medias res with the birthing of a calf. As the child-aged speaker observes the scene, the poem moves cinematically between the birth and the act of watching, made more resonant through the speaker’s reactions and in the context of a group of women. Just as the title “caul” conjures the homophone “call” and its accompanying associations—to contact, to be named or addressed—the scene of the calf birth evokes the speaker’s own coming into being, leaving us to contemplate how a sense of self forms in childhood.
To hear Cristi read her poem, click here:
Caul
The women and I watched and waited
as the cow bellowed and lowed
in the grasses
to call out her calf
which came down in a gauzy blue veil
like a plastic market bag. I was afraid
the calf would suffocate.
After the cow licked away
the shroud, I felt I had laid my eyes
somewhere they did not belong
and gathered myself up.
And the cow rounded up the calf
which tottered, quietly, away
in the field next to my grandmother’s house
where I was only just
taller than the grass and never
louder than its shushing.
Cristi Donoso Best is an Ecuadorian+American writer whose poems have been published in Threepenny Review, PANK, Pidgeonholes, Entropy, and elsewhere. She serves as the poetry editor for Folio Literary Journal at American University, where she is an MFA candidate. More of her work can be found at cristidonoso.com.
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