Janice Fuller is a poet who lives and writes in the desert of Tucson, Arizona, and on a lake in Wisconsin. She has degrees in English and Communication Disorders; spent her career as a speech pathologist. Janice’s poems have been published or are forthcoming in Gyroscope Review, The Heartland Review, The Remembered Arts Journal, Mojave River Review, and Caesura, among others.
The Siren
Janice S. Fuller
Issue 60, Spring 2020
Life did not go on as usual on my father’s funeral day.
The practice siren did not wail, the one that alerted us
to tornadoes, wars—the first Wednesday every month.
On an April afternoon we sat in the church he’d loved,
St. John’s. His friends and family waited,
prepared to hesitate the eulogy for the screaming sound
above their grieving heads.
But the siren held its breath, granting Walt
respect and recognition for how he’d lived his years
in the South Dakota town. His form familiar
as the pickup trucks on Main Street.
His job as a mechanic for their cars,
less special than his fiddle at their celebrations,
his daily walk for coffee with the guys,
his children nurtured far beyond his eighth grade.
The siren didn’t howl until the hearse had passed.