Haley Winans

While I Watch Flesh Erode off a Raccoon Skull in a Pickle Jar

Past the highway hugged by cranes
and foreclosed farms, off the cloud-
clotted vein of Skyline Drive,
tucked beneath the Blue
Ridge’s bruised mouth
of cavities, lies a national dark
zone where we were hunting for skulls
in the decay of oaks and dogwoods, near the end
of hoof crumb trails where the deer
laid down surrender-slow
and dissipated into the cold spring
air like wrongful innocence.
I couldn’t see a deer’s gleaming
wet nose if it licked my face.
I couldn’t see you hide
behind trees twenty feet from me,
watching me panic through bramble
like a half-dead possum. Pecking at my fear
like a sadistic turkey vulture. I saw the prettiest prey
in myself, tarred in the root-rot
of passivity, feathered in vibrant
scarves and fleece. Failing to find
you in such silence, a pitch-
black scrap of night, the crunch of dead
leaves like radio static.
In this dark I wanted God
to surgically pluck me from this forest
like a slow game of Operation,
tweeze me from the wound-
red walls of maples, bait me home
with the promise
of sunbathing in the glow of a love
more sacred and scintillating than the dried spit
of Saturn and stars on the sky’s black sheet.

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Haley Winans is a garden-lover and bunny mom from Annapolis, Maryland. She has poetry published in Slipstream, The Shore Poetry, Breakwater Review, Folio Literary Journal, Minnesota Review and elsewhere. She just graduated from the University of Memphis MFA Creative Writing program. She's a founding co-editor of Beaver Magazine. In undergrad, she studied Environmental Studies and Creative Writing, with a hyper-focus on environmental justice, sustainable agriculture and poetry. Twitter: winans_haley