Leveler Poetry Journal
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Fawn

 

I watched a boy

grow into a man

and became sad.

 

He was born

in Iowa where

it’s so cold and

snakes don’t

need a reason

to come out

of the corn.

 

People hunt

animals there.

Boys learn to

shoot early

and identify

themselves by

the blood on

their hands.

 

I held a heart

once. A real

one. I stood

over a kitchen

sink with my

thumbs pressed

into the purple tissue.

 

It smelled like rain.




Kristin LaFollette

levelheaded: Fawn

 

Before we discuss the context, we’d like to talk about how Kristin LaFollette’s poem ends: with the smell of rain. If you’re curious, there are reasons why rain smells the way it does. But to stay with the image, the smell of rain seems to evoke a universal feeling of freshness. It isn’t, however, a simple unsophisticated feeling you’d expect from, say, a sunny day (not to put down sunny days – not in a winter like this one). There’s something more complex about rain smell – it isn’t exactly pure; it isn’t easy-going. But it’s special.

 

“Fawn” ends with “[i]t smelled like rain” and “it” is a heart. Our speaker remembers standing in the kitchen holding one, pressing on it. It is explicitly a “real one,” not a metaphoric heart. Not the heart poetry may have grown weary of. For that very reason – this heart’s tangible, sensual existence in this stanza, “purple tissue” and all, we are actually able to think of its underlying role.

 

The speaker held this heart (a fawn’s maybe) and it smelled like a fresh thing. There’s an enigma to it. Perhaps the enigma is solvable, if you keep reading back. You’ll learn that boys lose their innocence early in Iowa. They’re taught to shoot, kill, be proud of bloody hands. Read further up. Our speaker watched such a boy. The boy became a man, learned to feel the still, sad music of humanity (like this man). The speaker watched it happen like she watched this heart, pressed it, maybe in order to try and grasp its essence.

 

To us, this is a Romantic poem (as in Romanticism, not romance). We miss that boy. We know childhood ends this way more often than not. We learn to see things factually, let blood be blood. The smell of rain reminds us of a thing or two. The memory is ambiguous: metallic, wet. We handle it, we’re doing fine. Occasionally snakes come out of the corn.

 

 

– The Editors