A few years ago I read In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. I’ve been thinking about that book at least once a week ever since. It takes place in a small farming community in Kansas, and tells the story of the brutal murder of the Clutter family. This was a real murder case that took place in 1959, becoming front page news nationwide. There is so much savagery in In Cold Blood. The underbelly of human nature is shown without restraint or ornamentation. But what really stuck out to me when I first read it was how strangely forgivable Capote wrote these characters. These were real people, who really took the lives of an entire family for almost nothing, and yet they were written with deep interior lives with quirks and happy moments just like anybody else. Capote was able to take these real people and condense their essence down into something relatable through fiction. He was able to dive into their interiors and pull out something that’s inside all of us. It felt voyeuristic in that way. That’s what stuck with me the most, and I wanted to explore it more. So about a year ago I wrote a poem about In Cold Blood and how it effected me. I hope you enjoy it.

Holcomb, 1959

Tonight is the night. I’ll

change the toddler but I can’t

promise to not smother it. I did

this to the family but motive

wasn’t on my mind. Don’t mind

me, I’m only trying to conceal

the pain of a parent, of a sibling.

On the night of November 15th,

1959, the Clutter’s were found

murdered in their country-house

Home. Years later Capote would

place their blood in my hands. It was

an accident, a precedent, I hope

to inquire more on the incident

but my current sensibilities forbid

me to return to the scene of my

first murder. I swam in a lukewarm

puddle but allowed the waves

to crash overhead. I’m in

over my head. Sometimes in

my bed I think I had done it,

that I had killed them, that life

seems so trivial in the moonlight convalescence.

-Tim Caston