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? ![](/tp.gif)
I gape at the deer’s unbodied leg
shrug my salvaged shoulder
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Image by Thiago Matos from Pexels