Two
poems from Jennifer Fumiko Cahill's The Fox Bride
followed
by a note on the author
Possession
All
winter, the fox came
for me, black-footed, listening
for my husband's sleep.
All winter,
lights drew me into the yard
to find fireflies, green and slow,
circling
his tall ears. Other nights,
he sat animal still, nose steaming,
in the
snow under the pear tree
he brought to bloom.
In
fear for my life, my husband
set five great hounds into the forest,
but
they tumbled back pups.
I told no one that I had known him
before he died,
when he was human,
or that he'd kneeled giddy, hugging
my waist, my palms
cupped to his ears.
Instead, I waited and kept salted meats
and whiskey
in the hedge.
Even
when my husband could stay awake
to keep watch, I dreamt – not
of
before, but of when he came back,
the pointed face a Noh mask
nodding in
the tree-line.
.
Inheritance
Before
the house is leveled, I sort
their possessions, room by room.
Springs and
weights slide inside broken
clocks,
and maps open to lacework
where mice have chewed through.
I try to clean
a wooden doll, her body
wound
in red kimono cloth, but her painted
face wipes away leaving an orange streak
where
the dot of her mouth was.
Standing
at the window where, turning
to speak, he had fallen, I can see
the post
in the yard missing its birdhouse.
When
I leave, I will take this envelope
of keys I am afraid to throw out,
a bottle
of her perfume gone whiskey brown,
and,
wrapped around a dowel, the ink print
of a fish he caught September 18, 1982,
the
spiky fin that cut his palm.
©
Jennifer
Fumiko Cahill is a native of New York State. She earned her BA from the College
of Creative Studies at the University of California Santa Barbara, and her MFA
from Columbia University. Her work has appeared in a number of journals, including
Prairie Schooner, the Southern Review, Gulf Coast, and the
Greensboro Review. She teaches writing at Temple University's Japan campus
in Tokyo, where she lives with her husband, the poet Jason Marak, and their two
children.
"Possession"
first appeared in Prairie Schooner; "Inheritance" first appeared
in the Southern Review.
