63

Slowly. Running from my scalp down through the long strands falling over my 
shoulders. The bristles wiggle through tangles and snags. Making my hair soft 
and weightless. Weightless as fog over a boreal forest, over pine-mapped back-

country trails or plots marked with crosses and stones.

My father combed his beard with a boar bristle brush. I wonder if he sensed him. 
Who would think to look in pie crust, glue, fertilizer, or in the bristles attached to 

a square backboard with a wooden handle?

Ordinary everyday things.

I have a pouty lower lip, I think while watching myself in the mirror. Again, rais-
ing my hand to the top of my head, I brush all the way down to the tough coarser 
ends. I keep reworking the same sections of long dark hair. I spent my lifetime 

watching. A lifetime watching his beard turn from brown to grey.

I wouldn’t have known just from looking that I could find you here. Unsnagging 
knots in my hair or resting, resting behind the medicine cabinet. Here. Among my 

toiletries.

I thought I’d find you in the forest.

Lumbering across the backcountry trails. A path carved out by cloven hooves 
beneath you and those that came before you. Before me. Blackberry brambles, 
nettles, and ferns. A lineage trampling out a ritual of migration across lifespans. 
Predestined and passed. Passed to me. Dad, you didn’t have much, but you did 

have what you knew of the woods. You had all the time we spent on those trails.
I know you would have wanted to leave something behind.

I squeeze my eyes shut as I tease out a difficult strand that won’t unknot. I picture 
you resting in the ferns. Belly pressed and laid into the soft earth. Grey-blotted 

eyes, a spotted snout, and soft brown stripes. Stripes that run laterally, stretching 
with the expansion of your lungs. Slowing.

Flesh, blood, tusks.

Bristles scratch softly. How did they scrap your body? What words did they use 
when they deconstructed you? Body to carcass. Creature to material. Bones, hair, 

and nails to minerals, bristles, and upholstery. 

I can’t go back. I still see you there.

Kayla McVeigh

Two Boars
- Best of Poetry -



64

In the forest. Charging. Through tangles and twists of brambles. Squealing out as 
metal rings in the air. Wings flushed from the coverage of low-hanging branch-
es. Tree sparrows part, weaving like needles through the fabric of the sky. The 
ground meets you cold and hard. Thorned vines of blackberry-spotted thickets 

snag and knot around you. Tightening, they tangle. Your hands swinging at your 
sides, underneath the cream-colored mittens I crocheted you—mistaken for the 
flag-raised tail of a white-tailed deer. It’s hard to see through the dense tangle of 

branches and vines. It’s easy to shoot a boar.

I hope they cried when they took that shot, but I doubt it.

Done. Throwing softened strands of long dark hair behind my shoulders, I can 
now place such an everyday thing back on the shelf. Behind a bathroom mirror—
clouded. Framed edges peeling with layers of slapped-on paint. In the medicine 
cabinet—so unsuspecting. Above the sink. Your bristles hold oils. Glistening, 

they could almost be mistaken for black waxy plastic.

How do they cut and gather you to make such fine everyday things?

Somewhere I imagine smokestacks and plumes spit poison in the shape of clouds. 
Like a crematorium spitting out the ash of those we loved. Distant factories and 

you on their fractured lines, just another order. Behind the scenes, worker’s hands 
remove me from your full processing. Removing me from the full ritual of your 

death.

I can only guess what the steps look like between death and consumption.

I thought it would be hard to find you. I pictured having to search for you in our 
well-scavenged woods, our backcountry trails. You had an eye for spotting wild 

mushrooms, puffballs, and morels.

It’s hard to imagine you anywhere other than in the forest and yet here you are in 
such everyday things.

Why am I so surprised when it’s you? Wasn’t there life in all our commodities—
at some point? So everyday and ordinary that we are abstracted from what they 

contain.

Dad, I kept your boar bristle brush.

Tangled in nettles, lips purple—blackberry stained. Resting. Belly pressed into 
the earth. Bleeding out red, you mixed into the soil of our backcountry trails.

 
I feel guilty for wanting to ask,

at what point did you stop being a boar and become a brush?