Girl

The barn roof’s gentle
booms shadowing the streaked shoulders
of farmhands
and the cowbells’ hymns, come here, girl,
tramp us home through the chaff,
and the jackdaw figurine atop the peak
beyond the Aeolian stalks. She invited us in
with a dish of unpasteurized milk
left on the porch at seven every evening,
wide-brimmed ranchers running,
and the subsequent calcium crescents
of their nailbeds, huff!
that stood out as they piloted the goats
across the yellow synagogue,
parting each of our salutes
and wading across the yard, crest-backed
egrets pluming love.
 
The whip cracking dust, eddies of tarnish
rising and falling like apparitions’ puckered chins,
boots slapping, race me to the paddocks,
the bloodless bovine fur. Race, erase.
My mother three miles from the chimney ¾
her paisley doesn’t stain near these rafters anymore. No one touched our
knees, ripped in the loft, but we dabbed our foreheads gingerly after knocking
into the peak of the hen house, gulping oxygen to resuscitate
the dripping golden sun. No praying. Run faster.
The lease of the land burned with the ruminated grass.
August lasted one day less.
 
 
 Previously published by The Critical Pass Review