Kelly Facenda
Look, She’s Gone
This is what I said, mom.
I said look at her, she’s not
coming back. I said look,
she’s gone.
One more stop and one more
violent start, again.
They were very good at making
your wounded heart pump
and your chest
rise and fall with their tubes and lines
and drips but
you weren’t fooling me.
I said, look at her eyes, because
once, someone said
something eloquent about the eyes
being a window and that’s how I knew,
that behind the filmy glass of your
corneas, behind your stubborn
pupils, was an empty beach,
and no matter how many shells
we looked inside of or turned over,
you had taken your soul and dug deep
into the cool and quiet sand,
where the earth
held on and on and on.
I Gather the Fawns
I gather the fawns,
their spindly, uncertain legs,
their tawny fuzz,
spots like hopeful stars.
I gather the orphans, and the babies rejected
in a flurry of pushing, stomping hooves.
I gather the ones that get too close to the road,
eating grass, mother absent.
My father says that buzzards
stand guard over the farmers’ fields.
A doe can hide her baby in the tall growth,
only to lose it to harvesting.
I gather those fawns to my chest,
and I outrun the engine and blades and birds
that feast on the dead,
the hungry sound of swallowing and
slashing on my heels.
I put them in the farm of my heart,
soft babies, who will easily
forget the warm milk of their
mothers. They take the bottle eagerly
from my hand, heads thrusting back
and forth, tugging, pulling, alive.
Jupiter
I pray that the neighborhood skunk doesn’t find
her way to our side-yard at 3:14 a.m. when I let my
dog out. He pisses and roots around, nose to dirt, for smells
from the night. I sit down on my narrow
porch step and look up. Sometimes I wonder
where my mother is. It’s the best time to
ponder big things, before the noises
of the day increase with the slow climb of light
from the horizon. It’s August and I’m staring
at a small light in the sky. Brighter than a star,
my phone tells me it’s Jupiter. I know so little
about the planets. I only know it’s
Jupiter because my phone told me.
Sometimes I think of how little I know
about things and feel shame. But I do know my dog,
and I can see the shadow of him in the
corner by the arborvitae, and I know
insomnia. I am familiar with all
shades of black and gray. I am an expert
on my couch, its nubbed fabric and where the cushions
sink just so. I could give a short lecture on
sitting under the dark shawl of night while
others are sleeping or write a chapter on my racing brain.
I can discuss the aggressive hum of white noise, and the
feeling of resignation as I rise once again to
make coffee too early. But please, just don’t
ask me to name Jupiter’s moons, or how to go about
untethering oneself from grief’s sinking cinder block.
Kelly Facenda graduated from SUNY Geneseo with a degree in English. She took all the creative writing courses that she could. She eventually went back to school and got a nursing degree from Villanova. She thoroughly misses being surrounded by writers, however, and started playing with poetry and fiction again. Fantastic at starting things but truly terrible at finishing them, Kelly finally wrapped up a few of her poems. She hopes you enjoy them.