Poem: What Turkeys Can Teach Us about Grief in Suburbia

Excerpt from Foxlogic, Fireweed by Jennifer K. Sweeney by permission of the Backwaters Press and University of Nebraska Press. © 2020 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska.

That it moves in circles, that you don’t need to be poised

or eloquent, the pressure scouring you

to orate by noon the true and succinct words

vastly-with-all then vastly alone

stuffed with food or void of it, the coffee too hot

in the thin Styrofoam the coffee so cold in the night-pot.

The turkeys advise against polarity or wisdom.

Walk with us our upland kind, steady

the loop of our walking under the crisscross

wires, under the live oak and the story of its rustling.

To be swept in a quiet shape together around any small death:

fender-struck cat, being of our being,

what fallen birdlet we never knew.

We gather the pieces

of each other and walk them round

the cul-de-sac, one holding what the other cannot.

The procession need not advance

nor march toward any heavy door waiting to close.

Let the ownership of grief be the shadow of a wheel

and its moving parts and if one sounds

the rattling drum from the well we bow

our necks and sound the terrible

beauty that weeps us, body we knew

or body we could never understand which once

we heard yowling in the night, crouched and feline

like a locked spring, we watched the magnificent

creature leap toward the sound of its mousetrap throat

and our hearts shuddered open in our baskety bodies.

We watched the dark fur of it fly toward itself,

claw-thing, no wings anywhere,

limp-dead street, the lights creaking on at dusk.

Round and round, oh moon what are we to do

with all these feathers?