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Foxes
Linda Malm

After we have amicably divided your possessions,
a fox, timid and intent, stands at the far edge of your garden
stares at me musing in your rocker by the open door.
I didn’t know of foxes in your forest,
but there in dappled light her coat shone
the color of your hair remembered from my childhood,
then she turned and vanished into your beloved woods

where you had made me feel the earth and swear
I’d leave you where wild roots would pull your body’s ashes in.
The rocks I pile to mark this place, your den.

—
Linda Malm was published as a teen and then only returned to poetry after she retired as a college dean. She was selected in a state-wide competition as a Writer of Los Luceros (the Robert Redford/NM Film Board enterprise). Her poetry has appeared in several issues of Howl and in the four Adobe Walls anthologies, as well as the Iowa Summer Writing Festival anthology and the literary journals The Examined Life and Sugar Mule (the Women Writing Nature edition). Her chapbook, Winded from the Chase, is in press with Kelsay Books.

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Have you read these poems:
Prelude by Jacqueline DeBorde
Still Life by Rick Smith

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