Tivoli, NY
The honey-warm A-frame where you left me
upstate and alone with the woods. That great room
built by your godparents, where your kin had piled years
of quilts. The big sleigh bed you’d never been allowed
to sleep in as a child—suddenly mine, all its duck-down,
and woollen rugs that nuzzled feet like a childhood dog.
I lay on the raw wood, tucked my body underneath
the walk-in’s rack of gowns, and splintered. In half-green
dawn, I saw noise-and-static deer, and squirrels pouring
from the poison ivy. The river-moat between here and the ranch
where your mother broke in horses. Truth is a tender fossil.
And everything dissolves in enough sunlight. Your godmother
takes me out for cigarettes: Some men are just gutless. I am a horse
with its leg bent back. I hear a gunshot: a fawn detonates
on the highway. That postcard-quiet once your hands left with you.
Zenobia Frost is a Brisbane poet. Her work can be found in Cordite, Scum, Australian Poetry Journal and Contemporary Feminist Poetry. A Queensland Writers Fellowship supports her work through 2018.
