Tag: Faith Paulsen

Three Red Foxes on a Gray Day by Faith Paulsen

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Three Red Foxes on a Gray Day
I hear it – returning from my mailbox–
how ragged in the wind-torn winter
the raw shriek–
scan field, woods, yard for bird or dog –
But no– one, two,
three sparks
lit matches flare
prance bark
coats thick and ruddy scatting beasts
trick me in the homegrown meadow
in my own backyard
near Philadelphia.
Their calls, their ack-ack-ack’s
stormy confab indecipherable
on this property
which our recent college graduate turned into a meadow
using sustainable skills learned on his study abroad.
Planned it, smothered grass, left oak leaves where they fell.
Planted butterfly weed and shade perennials,
digging bare-chested into soil
dreaming of earthworms,
frogs and butterflies to be enumerated next spring.
Then moved to Chicago
leaving us and our new meadow to process by neglect.
Today a snow day two years into pandemic
the pandemic itself an endless snow day minus
snowy bootprints, wet mittens
and wonder. Instead
mostly boredom and fear.
Still, today, The bleak meadow – cold, hard ground
under leaves under snow
where sometimes deer bed down in the brush –
renders up, now, here,
these little wildfires.
The one on the slope cries out open-mouthed ack
ack-ack-ack.
The other two bow their heads
as if a rock and not a bark
had been hurled at their flattened ears.
One prances, paws the ground, each step its own meaning.
(Male or female? Why are there three?)
Birth, death, mating, earths warm with kits. On land once tameless,
then Lenape, later farmland, woods.
In myth, the fox, fire-bringer. emerges
at times of great and unpredictable change.
Suddenly brave, the two rear up
chase the one through my meadow
into the un-owned woods,
leaving what they came to bring me: Their dance.
Mystery enacted.
*
Author of three chapbooks and mother of three sons, Faith Paulsen’s day job is in insurance, Her work appears or is upcoming in Scientific American, Poetica Review, Poetry Breakfast, Milk art journal, Philadelphia Stories, Book of Matches, One Art, Panoply, Thimble, Evansville Review, Mantis and others. faithpaulsenpoet.com/

Two Poems by Faith Paulsen

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Mother-in-Law

Invited to call her Mom, silently I called her Umbrella in Sunshine
Flea-Market Wristwatch Three Phone Calls A Day
Flash Flood Warning.
Why take a chance?
The cat will suck the breath out of the baby.
Spare Room Hoarder of get-well cards and flashlights
bottles of sleeping pills. (They’re not habit-forming – I should know,
I’ve been taking them for years.)
She called me Broken Eggs Hamster in a Plastic Ball.
Half-hour Early/Ten Minutes Late
She called me Barefoot in Snow–
That name I kept.
Years after her death
I wake stunned
when others call me Worry and I respond Be Safe.
Please don’t do
anything stupid.
Call it Poetic Justice. Call me So soon?
I call myself, I Didn’t Know—

*

My Mother’s Pessary *

Was she buried with it, I wonder?
That pinky-ball that for years supported
the vault over my begetting? My fault,
we used to joke.
Large baby, traumatic birth,
long-awaited longed-for,
late, costly.

Decades later, I witnessed
the price paid in her halting gait,
weary eyes (blue green like mine)
seeking a bench so she could sit down.
This is not like you, Mom.

Then it was I who supported
undressed, lifted. Even though
I was by then several times a mother —
I did not know this secret toll
that there could be this
late-in-life weight in the pelvis
pregnancy of years
this falling through
her overstretched muscles
falter, fail, a curtain’s elasticity lost
turned inside-out like a sock.

Attended, midwife to my mother’s aging
counted her breaths
an inexorable roller coaster inverted
dangles on the verge of dive-drop,
ripening
her tummy measured to house this blushing little thing
that for the last years of her life plugged up the dam
and kept the sky from falling.

* A therapeutic pessary is a medical device most commonly used to treat prolapse of the uterus.

*

Faith Paulsen’s work has appeared in Ghost City Press, Seaborne, and Book of Matches, as well as Thimble Literary Magazine, Evansville Review, Mantis, Psaltery and Lyre, and Terra Preta, among others. Her work also appears in the anthologies Is it Hot in Here or Is It Just Me? (Social Justice Anthologies) and 50/50: Poems & Translations by Womxn over 50 (QuillsEdge). She has been nominated for a Pushcart, and her chapbook A Color Called Harvest (Finishing Line Press) was published in 2016. A second chapbook, Cyanometer, is expected in 2021.