Nora Kirkham

Nora Kirkham is a poet and writer from Maine currently based in Scotland. She has an MA in Creative Writing from University College Cork, Ireland, and her writing has been featured in Rock & Sling, Transpositions, Ruminate Magazine, Tokyo Poetry Journal, and St Katherine Review. https://norakirkham.tumblr.com/

Freeing the Fox

When the tepee collapsed,
a chickadee flew
through its birch skeleton.
Campfire stumps soaked pine dew.
The woods were still the woods.
My father once hid among the trees
to build it with long branches,
clearing pine cones and spider curtains
from the ground.
On a skirt of white canvas,
he created a fox with a fresh snout
that nipped red paint on his thumbs,
and he might have hummed
as he dabbed black into its gleaming eyes.
He might have freed the fox
by cutting it from the canvas just before
a snowstorm overturned the tepee,
the fox trailing behind him to our cabin
where it would remain to tame our dreams
from a picture frame dry with mosquito wings.
My father and the fox guard all they see.
They outran years of rising snow before
that tepee fell to rotting bark.
On country roads, my father is
always breaking for foxes in the dark.