Aftermath of Falling
by Joel Ferdon
When I find the turkey vultures making plan and play
for the days-old meat, I hide the bones beneath
the mulch to meal by winter’s harm. I have 100 trees
and with them come the falling young—
kits only the size of my son’s fists. I have to hide
the blackened flesh before my son
sees the aftermath of falling. This past spring, he fell
only five feet— “too much fun,” he said, being
pushed in the wheelbarrow— and the lacerated liver
was enough to teach him and I that flying is so brief
yet gives way to airlessness. Sometimes we can’t
see what hurts us the most until what’s inside comes out—
striation and hue and shape that lives with us,
within us, but that we cannot witness until
we’re close to our exit.
Joel Ferdon’s chapbook, Elegy for My Father’s Bones, was published by Louisiana Literature Press in 2016, and his poems have appeared in Verse Daily, Asheville Poetry Review, Flyway, The Southern Quarterly, Cold Mountain Review, storySouth, Louisiana Literature, and elsewhere. Joel is the recipient of an Artist Support Grant through the North Carolina Arts Council, has been a contributor at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He serves as the Director of Library Services at Stanly Community College in Albemarle, North Carolina, and lives with his wife, son, and three black labs in Charlotte.
