Rebecca Hazelton
It’s not that the antlers pain, exactly,
budding from her forehead,
but they do in the first few weeks
feel raw,
and her gait
changes to accommodate
the weight of them,
so that she feels as if her head
is still turning after
it stops,
and there are doorways
to consider,
and other people’s eyes,
so that after a while
she stops coming inside,
and watches the house
from the edge of the woods,
thinking: those were my parents,
but now they are just people,
thinking once I slept there, and not
in a swirl of grass.
She remembers the last
boy she kissed longest
of all, but even that
goes with time
as her flank browns and dapples
and she grows elegant, tentative,
and dumb.
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Rebecca Hazelton attended The University of Notre Dame for her MFA in poetry and completed her PhD at Florida State University. She was awarded a fellowship year as the Jay C. and Ruth Hall Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Creative Writing Institute , and also received a fellowship from Vermont Studio Center. Her poetry has appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Salt Hill, Puerto del Sol, American Book Review, and Pleiades, and D.A. Powell chose “Book of Janus” for inclusion in Best New Poets 2011. Hazelton teaches creative writing at Beloit College. |