Tag: fox

America 2025 by Kelly Fordon

~ ONE ART ~ 9 Comments

America 2025

I have made enemies. My neighbor
just wrote to tell me all my suppositions
are wrong, that she somehow knows
better. Here we are, living in rural America,
with access to no one of any import. What
are we on about? Well, there’s my son,
for one–his safety. Also, the folks who run
the Mexican restaurant–the only good one
in town. What of them? And the eagles
circling now; searching for sustenance–back
when I was young, they were almost done.
My neighbor wants to drill under the lake,
and that’s the least of her infractions.
All week, I’ve planted myself in the window.
It’s January 2025 in America. We’re living
through a deep freeze. The only people
I’ve talked to since Monday are the waiter
at the Mexican restaurant and the librarian
as I was checking out Bunk by Kevin Young.
No news, no radio, no humans. I’ve started
to go mad. A little. Desolation. I don’t know.
At least I have the window. Monday went by
like the hours leading to an execution. On Tuesday,
I sat down in the window again. A few epochs in,
a red fox appeared, light-footing it over the ice—
so close to the edge. How she was managing
sub-zero temperatures—I can’t fathom.
Let me tell you what I did—so lonely, so
unnerved, still reeling, I ran for the door and
opened it wide. Hello, Fox! I yelled. Hello!
Of course, I scared her. She took off fast.
Soon, she was out of sight. It was a mistake;
but in the whole scheme of things,
one of the minor ones. I know she’s
out there now, and it helps. I’m not alone.
We’re not alone. I watched a small red fox
get the best of it–remember that next time
you’re facing down ice.

*

Kelly Fordon’s latest short story collection, I Have the Answer (Wayne State University Press, 2020), was chosen as a Midwest Book Award Finalist and an Eric Hoffer Finalist. Her 2016 Michigan Notable Book, Garden for the Blind (WSUP), was an INDIEFAB Finalist, a Midwest Book Award Finalist, an Eric Hoffer Finalist, and an IPPY Awards Bronze Medalist. Her first full-length poetry collection, Goodbye Toothless House (Kattywompus Press, 2019), was an Eyelands International Prize Finalist and an Eric Hoffer Finalist. It was later adapted into a play by Robin Martin and published in The Kenyon Review Online. Her new poetry collection, What Trammels the Heart, will be published by SFASUPress in 2025. She is the author of three award-winning poetry chapbooks and has received a Best of the Net Award and Pushcart Prize nominations in three different genres. She teaches at Springfed Arts in Detroit and online, where she runs a fiction podcast called “Let’s Deconstruct a Story” at https://letsdeconstructastory.substack.com/

Three Red Foxes on a Gray Day by Faith Paulsen

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments
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 Linda Blaskey

~ ONE ART ~ Leave a comment

Vulpecula: Little Fox Constellation

This morning, a crippled fox, by parasite or car impact,
I don’t know, pulled its hindquarters to the center
of the east pasture.

I herded the dying creature, with my pickup, out of the field
into its natal forest where it curled under a tree.

It staggered and I could have (or should have?) crushed it
with the truck’s tires or beaten it with the flat back of a shovel head,

but elected to leave it to the comfort of familiarity.
I turned the truck and drove away; released
the horses to gallop circles on this ground now changed.

A man I know who farms the next field over, would have cursed
the fox, would have drawn pistol and bullet. But I choose the word
stewardship for what I do. What I have done. (What have I done?)

At the table, the rest of the house sleeping,
I shave off a curl of bitter cheese, eat a cold plum.

Cassiopeia in her chair, doomed for her eternity
to contemplate her mistakes, hovers over the woods.

Deeper still, in space, the small constellation attached
to no myth will pulse briefly tonight with added lumens

though no one will see its effort for over 300 light years
and then only through the mirrored assist of an astronomer’s scope.

*

Killing Horses

We choose words more comfortable.

Euthanize. Put down. Put to sleep.

But kill is the word. Single syllabic. Hard.

A slug of phenobarb plunged into the vein nestled in the jugular’s groove.

Sometimes if they are down when the bolus hits their heart, they stand.

Those magnificent muscles full of memory bring them to their feet.

Then the collapse, the vet saying stand back, stand back.

              Kill: Etymology: Old English cwellan (to murder, execute).

The vet draws up the syringe, says it’s hard to lose the good ones.

I stroke the familiar of his chestnut coat, then walk away.

              Abandon: Etymology: Middle English forleven (to leave behind).

This is too large a death to witness.

*

Linda Blaskey (she/her) is the recipient of two Fellowship Grants in Literature from Delaware Division of the Arts. She is poetry/interview editor emerita for Broadkill Review, is coordinator for the Dogfish Head Poetry Prize, and current editor at Quartet. Her work has been selected for inclusion in Best New Poets, and for the North Carolina Poetry on the Bus project. She is author of the chapbook, Farm, the full-length collection, White Horses, and co-author of Walking the Sunken Boards.

She grew up in Kansas and Arkansas and now lives in Delaware.

Two Poems by Sally Nacker

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

David’s Art

That day, I painted the sea at the seaside
where we lived in a small house
with a big window looking seaward.

I loved the wind and rain that thrashed
against the windowpane. I loved
all weather, altogether. I even thought

I was the weather; and the sea, I thought, was me
as my watercolors splashed over the paper, coloring
the blank world with a heaving and a tossing

of my own heart. I was a child, and I loved
that day at the window by the sea, looking
out at myself looking in at me.

*

North and South

When I ask whether you have moved
upstairs, you tell me
your study
is in your basement
still, and though that sounds
deep and dark, you say
it is most lovely with big windows
looking south
across a gravel path
that cuts through a weedy flowerbed.

It is down this path,
you say, that yesterday
a little fox came running
toward you, then stopped
at the window
and looked northward
into your wildness.

*

Sally Nacker was a recipient of the Connecticut Audubon Society’s Edwin Way Teale Writer-in-Residence at Trail Wood award in the summer of 2020. She is published in numerous magazines, including The Sunlight Press (forthcoming), Blue Unicorn (forthcoming), Hawk and Whippoorwill, Hoot, The Orchards Poetry Journal, Mezzo Cammin: An Online Journal of Formalist Poetry by Women, The Fourth River, Grey Sparrow Journal, The Red Wheelbarrow, and The Wayfarer. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Fairfield University. Her prior collections—Vireo (2015), and Night Snow (2017)—were published by Kelsay Books. Her third collection–Kindness in Winter–also by Kelsay Books, is due out in April, 2021. Sally lives in Connecticut with her husband, and their two cats.