Fear of Everything

Fear of Everything was winner of Palanquin Press’s 2000 chapbook contest. The cover references one of the poems, “Touched on the Cheek by the Tip of a Vulture’s Wing.”
Touched on the Cheek by the Tip of a Vulture’s Wing
Even the best can’t do it,
everyone told me, there’s no way
to write about grandparents
without getting sentimental.
I was thinking that again
as I turned onto the county road
from Kingsburg to Mars Bluff,
windows down, spring just hinting summer,
wild flowers blooming in the ditch–
white, purple, gold–my grandmother
gone for a half a year now.
I swerved slightly to miss
a `possum crumpled on the asphalt
when a rack of feathers,
big as a child, exploded
across my windshield
and circled back to the corpse,
so hungry for death
life itself was worth the risk.