by Rebecca Weil
It was here, beneath the rock pile
just below the barn, where the pasture
meets the red maple woods—
Coyotes pulled out the chicken carcass,
spreading the hen’s golden feathers
into a trembling fan across the last corner of green pasture,
like a gift on an altar no one was visiting.
It makes me wonder if coyotes
also found my children when I wasn’t watching—
below the lichen covered stones
and the roots of the oak tree.
Too early, their heart beats had stopped,
and my body did what women have always done,
blood to blood, a dissolving of life and self.
My husband and I buried them,
twice, under the old tree where the deer
path goes into the woods
and great horned owls call;
a temple where loss rattles itself
into the shape of wind over the fields.
The gray rocks have a thin coating of first snow.
I imagine the stones must remember the glacier
that left them here.
Rebecca Weil is the author of the award-winning book Bring Me the Ocean. Recent writing has been published in River Teeth’s Beautiful Things, The Journal of Wild Culture, and Phoebe, in which her piece “Old Friends,” was a finalist in the 2024 nonfiction contest. In addition, her poem, “Hair Thief: Kleptotrichy,” was a finalist in the 2023 Seneca Park Zoo Nature Poetry Contest for emerging poets. Weil is completing a collection of essays and poems tracing love, loss and solace found in connection with nature in Upstate New York.
Emerge Literary Journal 