Issue 4: Echoes

Prey Animal

Melissa Thorne

She shuffles across the stretch
of pavement, shoulders curved
inward. Drawn taut like a bowstring
and hunched around the purse
clutched tight under her frail
arm. She refuses my arm, and I don’t dare
mention a cane, don’t dare offer
to move the car closer. We dance
a stilted waltz across the laneway, divided
by bones but linked by blood. My mother laments
her mother’s stubbornness, worries about her
just existing, alone in that house. This worry,
I fear, lives in my marrow, gnaws at
my womanhood. I’ve inherited it, siphoned it
from ancestral soil. Vigilance and survival:
a prey animal’s life passed down
the maternal line—coded in blood,
bones and time—a visceral download.

Prey to her husband’s stout fists and vicious
mouth, to scalpels when the baby stuck
in her hips, to poverty, that baby buried
without a headstone. Prey to a son
so much like his father, to the Good
Housewife’s Guide, to the blast radius
of a nuclear family. Prey to the silence
of a generation.

Good prey won’t admit weakness
until death comes. She’s ninety-two─not dead
yet. She’ll ask for help going into the ground.
A chipmunk zips by, cheeks ballooning
as paws pound asphalt and nails whisper,
alerting predators to its location. It’s racing
against the gaps in the canopy, and despite
foggy eyes, she clocks its presence.
She tells me she hates chipmunks,
says last week, she caught one
feasting upon a baby bird.
“Don’t worry,” she soothes,
“I chased it off with a shovel.”

Melissa Thorne is an associate member of the League of Canadian Poets with work published/forthcoming in Sola Poēta, Poetry Pause, WEI Magazine and ROOM. She lives on the traditional and treaty territory of the Michi Saagiig and Chippewa Nations (Cobourg, ON) with her husband, two young sons and Irish Wolfhound, Walter. She reluctantly serves as Walter's social media manager after he inadvertently went "viral" online.