all feral pigs must have acorns
Allegra Wilson
Allegra Wilson is a mother, organizer, queer person, and emerging writer. She has read and written poetry from an early age, and has work published or forthcoming in Action, Spectacle, Bear Review, and JanusWords. She lives in Northern California with her family.
Date published: August 30th, 2024
Why this Knocked Taylor out:
I love that I had to work to get this poem and I loved the payoff when it clicked for me! Capitalism sucks! We are all feral pigs! Look at these mole-rat humans ruining everything!
This poem pulls zero punches. I love the way that puts demands on the reader. You won't get to chill, there's no respite, and you have to work hard to dig your hands into this poem to get to the meat of the metaphor. The language is electric and visceral just as it needs to be for meaning making to really happen.
There’s also a serious level of anger in this poem and I think sometimes angry poems can get a bad rap, or feel abrasive but seriously, why aren’t we all as angry as this poem is??
And not to spend too much time on content/message and ignore the craft aspect, but the sound work in here is legit. The use of hard consonant sounds (Carcinogens creeping, horse’s hooves, rotting and ripening, gutless…gun, etc) really function to hit the reader with the sound as much as they are hit with the message.
Interview
Why did you choose Team Taylor?
“Send all your nature crap to Taylor.” I’m like, 85% nature crap so my choice was clear.
This poem's meaning is situated within deep metaphor, why did you make this choice?
One of my childhood memories is of playing with my cousins in the hills and my aunt being concerned we’d be mistaken for feral pigs and shot. So, I started reading and researching feral pigs and learned more about why they are such an issue, how they destroy crops and are an economic problem for agricultural businesses. I live in Sonoma County and wine is really big here, and while I was reading I was struck by the destructive nature of the wine industry and the hypocrisy of these big, ecologically devastating businesses being in conflict with animals that are kind of doing the same thing but on a smaller scale and with less intent. So all that to say, the metaphor showed up for me as a part of the process, and then I got the opportunity to drag a local villain which was pretty cathartic.
What other poetic commentary/type of poetics/poets do you see your poem in conversation with?
This poem was written in a class taught by the incomparable poet, Kelly Gray. Her poem “I Am A Dead Wolf Talking To Boys” was a huge influence in terms of getting into the amoral animal space. The class was on obituaries, elegies, and epistles. This poem isn’t quite any of those things, but it is grief in the form of anger. Also maybe some epistles can be calls to action, and those calls can be fueled by an angry grief. So I think it is in conversation with the poetics of mourning and the poetics of change-making in that way.