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  • I Ching #25Innocence
  • Karen Zealand (bio)

Her dad had the first bow he ever made, strung with vine, then sinew, he told her, from his first kill, expecting she’d believe him. A possibility that never occurred to her, that her mother, one ordinary day, would leave, simply not be there when she returned from school. He would teach her archery and she would live, as he, for the curve of wood in her hand. Maybe one day she’d forgive him. Her first deer, not from a kill, but the impact of a car; a violent panting, she thought from the doe’s last gasps until she realized something alive inside the animal was struggling to get out. Her dad beside her, she begged him, with his knife, to slit the fawn an opening in its mother, her heart frantic with its kicking. He held her ‘til the heaving stopped. [End Page 612] When she pulled the bowstring taut, her target, a small moon of darkness, her arm tensed against its pressure: the release:    how sorrow could fly    unerringly so many times it would become love.

Karen Zealand

Karen Zealand has published poems in such periodicals as Southern Poetry Review, Poet Lore, Kansas Quarterly/Arkansas Review, Kalliope, and Hanging Loose. She is a counseling therapist in a psychology practice in Cumberland, Maryland.

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