Why We Stayed
By Shaylah Kloska



I wanted to know how the animals felt the approach of winter—

the thickness of the mud nests, the departures of the robins.
And wondered when I learned instinct

why my family stayed. We

opened the door to knee-deep snow, while the television played earthquakes
in California, a winterless place.

His instinct (as Man)
was to gather rootward
his woman and children to the gray webs of barns
and the ash-blonde landscape of his uncle’s farm,

with something like blood welling up in his throat
as he panned the width of field with that beast of a camera on his shoulder. While,

(as Woman),
she stood lithe as a bird, nervous as a rabbit in the yard,
her heart beating then as it would in the dark beside him

with panic in that wide country.

She felt it closing in on her,
smothering her, lingering in the morning
with the smoke from her cigarette as she perched on the stool

watching the German city wall falling on the 10-inch in the kitchen.
I remember this, the long white kitchen and my mother there,
and her skinny fingers trying to pull the rabbit

from the wire fence.

I asked her, Was it trying to escape?
No, she said. It froze to death. And not to worry, my father
would bury it in the evening.

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