NEVER FULLY

Once, I traveled to the prairie

                where bison graze on grassland

and weather is shuffled and dealt

               like a cheater’s deck—

                                              floaters, marks, and bends

of snow and hail, thunder, and sun.

 

I must have swallowed a seed on the prairie

             and it grew     because I can see the magnitude

of what came near
                                      extinction.

 

My seventh grade teacher told the class

                                       bison were dying like the dinosaurs.

Bad weather, she said.

Even the National Park Service won’t say why.

I have learned not to trust governments, teachers, or textbooks.

Maybe this is why I hold tight to godless miracles,

                                        especially the apt ones

like when the
stars lowered themselves
outside my bedroom window
and clung like insects against the glass
the night my mother died.

Doctors don’t like magical thinking,
underestimate the abracadabra and truth magical thinking uncovers.
And there is nothing sick about joy or truth.

                   Once, something white-gray appeared in my garden

under the crabapple tree

                            too still and shiny to be bone, shell, or worm.

I dug at it with my finger and found

                            a plastic figurine of a bison

no bigger than a rose head,

           perhaps an old discarded toy or a child’s whim to bury.

I brought the figurine inside and washed it,

              set it on the window sill above my kitchen sink,

and as I scrub dishes, wash vegetables, or my hands,

    I am reminded of how some things are never fully gone,

even when some try to make it so.

 

 

H.E. Fisher’s poetry appears or is forthcoming in At Length, Novus, Anti-Heroin Chic, Indianapolis Review, Miracle Monocle, and Canary, among other publications. H.E. is the editor of (Re) An Ideas Journal. Their first collection, STERILE FIELD, will be published by Free Lines Press in 2022.