Perception Spring 2023

Day's Work
Fiona White
The Food Network plays in the tin-roof home
Crafted with painstaking precision
On the glades of Roanoke, VA.
The TV is above the makeshift cross,
Misshapen and crooked.
Count your blessings for the bad stew and roast,
Lose the attitude and “do more.”
Rake, shovel, and forget
Mama’s cold complexion when she says
“Lower your voice.” walking in
After the day’s work,
Bringing in mud from the rills.
I refuse to ask for guidance,
The longshoreman doesn’t.
We’ll joke on the route home,
Watching the seasons change.
It was a tradition for her to love us heathens
As a token for the pain.
It’s a new day
And the end crowns the work.
Deer
I. Alvarez
He tells me over dinner that he’ll die on December 12th. (Not actually).
It’s a little morbid joke, like many he’s made before. A doctor’s humor.
I don’t think I’ll ever really get it because I’ve never been the one
biopsing tumors under a transmission electron microscope. Instead
I’ve been the little girl standing to the side of the lab, wondering why
the smell of formaldehyde is so fucking addictive, watching him slice
through tissue. I’ve always been little to him, even now at twenty two.
He doesn’t like knowing I’m a woman. When we moved apartments,
he packed up my box of Trojans in silence. But I guess it doesn’t
matter, because he’s going to die on December 12th (not actually),
and I have to laugh at this idea. I’m twenty two. I know what loss is.
I see it today. The coyotes have already eaten its lower half and shit
and bile and innards are spilling out onto the dead leaves, and flies
have begun to circle the carcass. One of them lands in its left eye
and it makes me sad. I want to close them, but I don’t know if deer
have eyelids. I don’t know much about biology, not like he does, and
so he explains things to me as if I were a kindergartener. He says, my
aorta doesn’t work properly. It has become enlarged. Sometimes I
smell formaldehyde in my dreams. It sort of reminds me of the first
time I got high off of alkyl nitrites. I inhaled and inhaled and I was
flying somewhere in a parallel reality. Maybe it was one where he’s
not going to die on December 12th, or any day ever, because I can
shrink his aorta and I can unsnap the deer’s neck and I can tell him
to stop making those jokes. They taste bad at the back of my throat,
like decay or a death rattle.
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