by Jennifer Saunders

after Jane Hirshfield

The fox keeps sneaking onto the patio.
I knock hard on the window,
but a few nights later she’s back, sniffing around the grill.

We keep everything clean.
There are no scraps but an after-scent of salmon,
chicken breasts, an indulgent rack of ribs.
I’ve heard that foxes are domesticating themselves
in London, so why not here where the woods
border our garden, where we might once
let fall a flake of fish?

I want to tell her, don’t do it.
I want her to know it’s a trap.
I knock hard on the widow.
I mean to say, hold on to your woody ways.

Jennifer Saunders (she/her) is the author of Tumor Moon, winner of the Concrete Wolf Chapbook Award (Concrete Wolf, 2025) and Self Portrait with Housewife, winner of the Clockwise Chapbook Competition (Tebot Bach, 2019). A Pushcart, Best of the Net, and Orison nominee, Jennifer’s work has appeared in Baltimore Review, The Georgia Review, Ninth Letter, Poet Lore, Santa Fe Literary Review, and elsewhere. She is the co-editor of Stained: an anthology of writing about menstruation (Querencia Press, 2023) and lives in German-speaking Switzerland where she teaches skating in a hockey school.