ISSUE: Fall 2022
The white slap of the moon after hail gone through
ivy to silver April’s first green blades: There I listened
for the really real while the quick clouds passed overhead
because it looked like the world shifting black-white-gray
through the howls of the night had something to tell me
about making a home of it—how to hold the hand of someone
who is afraid. In elementary school, an aging farmer patiently answered
questions about the combine that sent his arm back
to dust while our teacher shuddered in the library’s doorway—
the rest of us transfixed without embarrassment as if
the man’s story could save our own young lives, the parts of us
that were already leaving—feeling, but not knowing—
that a child carries three hundred bones at birth, loses ninety-four of them
and often in the spring months when one senses the muscles stretching
to a refined sheen in a body that will need to set up camp for a while
along a shoreline hissing and beating windblown and wood-swept
by some cold sea goddess coasting inland to show a passerby
how to magnetize the sun to the rocks—to call it down—immense
energy, slow honey burning up algae and root: a demonstration
in how to adjust to a realm of excess briefly and without hesitation.
