In mid-winter crows covered my father's farm
until his gun scared them out of the frozen stalks
into a hard blue sky where they became one black wing
on the horizon; if he shot a rabbit, he let me carry it
to the house where my mother made the neat slit
behind the ears and peeled the sot fur down
the warm body. And from my bed in the corner,
I watched him hunker over his dinner while my mother
swirled the bright blood around the white porcelain sink,
sluicing it with clean water until it was gone,
leaving the pale moon floating at the bottom.
J.T. Ledbetter is a Professor of English at California Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks, Illinois. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Sewanee Review, The Prairie Schooner, Rhino, The New York Quarterly, and others. Recent creative non-fiction pieces are in Under the Sun and Big Muddy.
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