—after Larry Levis

 

She bows to the work in her sink
without mention or singing.
For years, she will see every bird carry
the soul of an unlived life on its wings
as the egg she boils then cools
and cracks against the sink
and peels into pieces,
taking with it chunks
of white flesh until the perfect
body is pocked, will be lunch
she takes to her mother, houses down
a tree-lined street where crows
wait high in the branches.
When her father dies— his skin
still on the hangers of his cheeks,
his toenails packed with what grows
in the crevices of the dying—mornings,
she does their dishes, curses her sisters
who sit on couches. She feeds brown birds,
half-feral cats, lets her hair grow
and gray. At night she finds Pleiades,
stars named for seven sisters,
daughters of Atlas who holds
the sky up to save them. And though
she stares at them for a long time—
their light dissolves into blackness,
a moon rises, turns to undress,
and her wide back carries the night.

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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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