Page 29 - WTP Vol. VII #1

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The Veteran’s Wife
Standing beside him in the yard,
she watched fireflies pierce the dark like silent tracers.
There was nothing to say.
It was a hot July
neither here nor there and of absolutely
no importance. Both kids were grown,
but not grown-up—anyway, they weren’t his kids.
There were other complexities,
but nights like this it almost didn’t matter.
In retrospect, she might not cry Kill it
when the raccoon, injured, staggered out from underneath
the row of arborvitae. And in another life
he might not have bludgeoned, whacked it with a dull-edged shovel into a glistening mound of hair.
It was, like every event that stole their days,
a momentary terror. She took his arm again—
the carcass already hauled away, slid down
into the unsightly pit where he dumped junk, the blown tires— and fireflies resumed reconnaissance.
Davis is the author of Taking Care of Time (MSU Press, 2018), winner of the Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize from Michigan State University; of Leopold’s Maneuvers (University of Nebraska Press), winner of the Prairie Schooner Poetry Prize; and of Details of Flesh (Calyx Books). Her poetry has been published in Poetry, Hudson Review, and Superstition Review, among others. She is the recipient of an NEA poetry fellowship, and was recently selected to be the first poet laureate of Bethel, CT.
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