Recovery

Jane Fuller Click to read more...

fullerphotoJane Ann Devol Fuller is a graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. She co-authored a book of poems and prints, Revenants: A Story of Many Lives (2000), with Deni Naffziger, which was awarded a Special Projects Grant by the Ohio Arts Council. She co-edited Riverwind Literary Magazine for several years and teaches at Hocking College in Nelsonville, Ohio. Her work has appeared in Denver Quarterly, Pikeville Review and Aethlon: Journal of Sports Literature. Currently helping edit StockPort Flats’ Confluence Series, she is working on a manuscript tentatively titled The Torturer’s Horse.  In 2015 she was awarded the Boatwright Poetry Prize by Shenandoah.  She's now playing with an all-female group of Old Time Musicians called The Trophy Wives.

to Jesse

Better a small, wild death
(the doe and perhaps a trailing pair of fawns)

than your Ford
flipped into the Hocking
where Scott’s Creek meets the train yard.
In this place it makes sense
not to swerve
when the deer leap for lodi
or fields of hog corn.

Remember
just north of Phoenix
when you stopped to help
the blue pickup idling on the shoulder,
the man with his buck knife
waiting there for anyone? It happened to be you
who knelt with the doe,
pulled her weight, as he coached you,
into your own.  No time
since hesitation breeds hope
that by nightfall turns vain.

You say her black eyes burned into you
and then went dead,
two spent bulbs. You held on to them
as long as reason would allow.

You say helping her through
seemed spiritual, visceral as any remembering

now that you’ve felt in her dead weight
the absence
of expectation.
What it is to stop wanting.

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