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  • Once home, and: Venison
  • Leah Naomi Green (bio)

Once home

my friend could feel the two maples not being there even in the dark—the consent of weight

to gravity’s long petition; all the angled, captured space of them, released.

The front trees had fallen in the first storm, which she spent in a cancer ward in Maine.

In the clean purview of her heartache the hospital had been an airport, thin-walled: everyone waiting

to leave when it’s time, or past, for their departures; arrivals down the hall—“gate 25B, as in boy.”

Since girlhood she’d collected sugars from the maples, their sap pulled like soda through a straw.

Even this March it dripped through the surgical hole without tempo, gathered until it could not gather more, fell

into a washed Gatorade bottle the size of my chest cavity.

She boiled the sap, clear as water, until it obscured, became apparent, sweetened

all day in the tiny kitchen of what had been the servants’ quarters

as if to say to the house, the maples: “we don’t have to worry about it, you see, it’s the past”;

this is a guest I know I have no bed for. It felt good, she said, [End Page 143]

to wake the next morning, stretch arms overhead and see

the world obscured, having turned finally apparent; good,

she said, that now everyone could see nothing was the same: the roots had all been offered to the air,

the branches, more immense than distance had ever let on, took up the whole yard. [End Page 144]

Venison

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. When I turn the water off, I can hear his blade unmoor muscle, sail through her fascia.

We put her leg and buttock on the wooden table, where we will gather her between us to eat all year. It is all I ever see: a thing, alive, slowly becoming my own body. [End Page 145]

Leah Naomi Green

leah naomi green is the author of the chapbook The Ones We Have. Her honors include the Flying Trout Press Award and the St. Lucia Poetry Award. She received her MFA from the University of California, Irvine, and teaches writing and environmental studies at Washington and Lee University. She lives in Rockbridge County, Virginia, where she and her husband grow food and homestead with a small community.

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