Jill Mceldowney | November | Glass: A Journal of Poetry

Jill Mceldowney is the author of the chapbook Airs Above Ground (Finishing Line Press) as well as Kisses Over Babylon (dancing girl press). She is a cofounder and an editor for Madhouse Press. Her previously published work can be found in journals such as Muzzle, Vinyl, Fugue, Whiskey Island, the Sonora Review, Half Mystic and other notable publications.

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Madhouse Press

Also by Jill Mceldowney: Airs Above Ground Alydar Keen Ice

February 2019

Jill Mceldowney

November

Into that clenched fist of first frost — let me go — those woods, horned cave of lacertilian winter, the hunt my own father taught me waits. My hair is still long, I still know to scent for prey, how to sight down the line of a rifle how to trigger a doe to wing from quarter mile away. I set a piano on fire and shove it off of a building. This land — wrecked as air collapses air, a bullet has been practicing how to be sky how to meet me on that brutal, common ground of slumber — crows guarding trees guarding extinction’s sleep. I am worried about what I might bring back to life if I continue the nightmare of believing Paradise is a tree with knives mounted like stalactites. It’s not like the deer was dead when we finally tracked the end of her steps marked by step’s larger mark of blood — the body is not that easy to be rid of; twisted, submerged in ice, half struggling to drown on the sky opened under her skin. My father says “Talk to the dead, now’s your chance.” I pull a shard of bone from her hair — no — a key — her bones are piano keys. Is my childishness showing as I kneel to whisper, to name the kill? This is the love a hunter has for the living. One part of me thinks how else could I enter the sky, so ordinary, so lived in the rooms I’ll never live while the other begs what has a sky done to me that love has not?

In Michigan, November means the evenings vibrate with gunshots. It’s almost shocking how easily the violence of a gun going off becomes the backdrop against which we live. A gunshot is background noise — pay no mind, think nothing of it. In Michigan, parents take their children into the woods with them during hunting season and I was no exception. One night, I remember being so afraid of finding the deer still alive. What then? This poem focuses on that first shoulder brush with violence, the strangeness, the complexity of meeting death.

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