Something ought to make you want to stay.
Rhododendrons burn in the yard,
red that when you look away, remains.

Voices from the kitchen edge backward
through your life, through the window where
a grackle swings on suet cake strung through with wire.
A common bird. So many common flaws.

You feed the cookie to the dog.
Count the bolder, more important birds.
The grackle stays, its neck so black
there’s something there that might be
something else—your sleeping children
on a floe of ice—so what is grief
if not a numbing from the work
that can’t be undone?

All day a woodpecker rattles the house.
From the eave, a phoebe flies. Again,
a blue hammering in the hard air.
Then silence.

It makes its way your way, the quiet
making plans to take your life.

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Jane Ann Fuller authored HALF-LIFE (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2021), a finalist for the National Indie Excellence awards. A recipient of the James Boatwright III Poetry Prize (Shenandoah), her poems appear in Calyx, Verse Daily, Blue Earth Review, On the Seawall, B O D Y, and elsewhere, including the anthologies All We Know of Pleasure: Poetic Erotica by Women, and I Thought I Heard A Cardinal Sing. Collaborations include Revenants: A Story of Many Lives, published with a grant from the Ohio Arts Council.

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