2024 Nature & Place Second Place Winner: “Cocke County” by Kiyoko Reidy
We’ve got another winning poem on deck! Kiyoko Reidy is the Second Place Winner of Frontier Poetry‘s 2024 Nature & Place Contest. Read their inventive & provocative poem, “Cocke County,” selected by judge Flower Conroy.
Here we have a poem that drops its reader right into the vehement narrative of this poem and does not shy away from its gripping and powerful details, centering everything around the complicated history of a hometown.
(Please note: this poem contains themes of animal harm.)
Cocke County
The men ring their birds, uncertain
orbit of battle, backup dancers
to their roosters. What feathers
not already plucked, now stained
the pale dirt, crimson confetti
at the long party’s end.
The men needed something
to quicken their blood, something
to think of in bed beside
their tired wives. The birds’ red
ridge of flesh. Carnage
of wing and cockspur. Hats tipped
low over their eyes to disguise it:
the wild lusting for a violence
other than the dull brutality of living.
They busted the cockfighting pit
less than an hour from my home
when I was nine. When the FBI raided,
nobody would claim the three-hundred
gamecocks present at the pit—arced gaffs
roped to their ankles, wattles severed
to prevent the opponent’s advantage. The news
said nothing about the manner of execution. When
the people arrested in the raid claimed cockfighting
was part of what kept their communities alive, I was
unforgiving. I was a child and quick to condemn
cruelty. This morning, researching the cockfights
and the raid on Appalachia’s largest
and oldest fighting pit, an ad popped up with a video
of two roosters locked in fatal step, their men sulking
behind them like oversized shadows.
I watched. I watched
the terminal dance, the birds’ breasts unzipping
in the low, pixelated light, the throbbing
of wings, the feathers gleaming on the red clay like slivers
of moon. I had wagered nothing on this fight;
knew nothing of blood sport. It didn’t matter.
I watched because I had to watch, because I felt
the rush too close to pleasure that comes
from knowing something is fighting
for its life, and this time, mercifully, it’s not you.
