Annette Sisson
Annette Sisson lives in Nashville, TN with her partner and two dogs. Her favorite place to write is the passenger seat of a moving car. Annette’s poems appear in Valparaiso Poetry Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Rust & Moth, Cloudbank, Lascaux Review, Cumberland River Review, Blue Mountain Review, Cider Press Review, Tupelo’s Milkweed Anthology, and others. Her second book, Winter Sharp with Apples, is forthcoming from Terrapin Books in October 2024; her first book, Small Fish in High Branches, was published by Glass Lyre Press in May 2022. She was a 2021 Mark Strand Scholar at the Sewanee Writer’s Conference and a 2020 BOAAT Writing Fellow. Her poem won The Porch Writers’ Collective’s 2019 poetry prize, and her work has placed in Frontier New Voices, The Fish Anthology, and many other contests--and has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nine times. Find her at https://annettesisson.com



UNDONE

The sight of it       the deer’s perfect foreleg  
pried from the dog’s mouth      balanced 
between      my husband’s hands 

              The surgeon’s scalpel opens my shoulder 

The leg      covered in dun suede 
cloven hoof      chiseled onyx 

             Forceps divide my muscles       first layer      second
             ancillary cuts      arm unhitched from socket

Limb so thin it hardly seems muscled 
tendons pinned to bone    immaculate 
except for the breach      rimmed in red

              The saw cleaves the head       of my humerus
              bone spurs     shredded rotator cuff  
              arthritis           all cleared away  
              titanium rod    cup            sutures

My husband implores     what should I do with this? 

I gape at the deer’s      unbodied leg 
shrug my salvaged shoulder  

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