Find and share the perfect poems.
the room where I want to rest, I find my hands and am able again to see you— clear eyed where we left one another— last year in the passenger’s seat, having woken after Colorado, which was beautiful and which I did not wake you for, wanting all the aspens, all the golden, quaking aspens, and their silence for myself.
Copyright © 2012 by Leah Naomi Green. Originally published in The Ones We Have (Flying Trout Press, 2012). Used with permission of the author.
“What is dying is the willingness to be in denial.”
—angel Kyodo williams
The heron flew away
and I wanted to tell someone
how long it stayed,
how close I got,
how much I missed it
even as it stood
The buck is thawing a halo on the frosted ground,
shot in our field predawn.
Last night we pulled a float in the Christmas parade.
It was lit by a thousand tiny lights.
My daughter rode in my lap and was thrilled
when the float followed us. Ours is a small town.
Everyone was there. And their faces,
not seeing ours, fixed behind us, were an open sea,
a compound sea of seas that parted
under our gaze. And Santa was bright,
though my daughter shied from the noise of him.
She studied the red and white fur of his suit.
The deer is still alive in the roadside grass. In an hour, we'll cut her open, her left hip broken, the bone in her dark body; now the white Camaro shocked in the night and the boy wet-faced in the back seat, his parents at a loss by the hood, too young to have meant any of it: the giving or taking. They are glad for our headlights, glad for our rifle. Her head still on, she hangs outside our kitchen window for the blood to drip, skin pulled down like a shirt. I watch my husband undress her with a knife. I wash the blue plates.