CONTENTS

FORGOTTEN FIELDS

FACTORIES OF DISCONTENT

SPEED OF NOW

LOVESHORN

WE ARE WHAT WILL BECOME OF US

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

FORGOTTEN FIELDS

Pressing sponges to the wall as water dripped from elbows,

they gift-wrapped the insides of a farmhouse gone to bush.

We weren’t allowed in ’til moving day, then

we ran through the rooms like it was Christmas.

A plastic-wrapped window bed, a warm spot by the wood stove.

We claimed corners of the house with our dolls, our bodies

knitting in with this place that so wanted kids.

Trees sprouted apples, cherries dropped from heavy boughs.

The farmhouse mellowed, ripened, held secrets so long

infinity bloomed as wind lifted the curtains,

leaves dusted shadows across his face

as fleeting as day, inchoate like the night.

My brother fell asleep with his heel banging the wall.

Now wallpaper peels like petals drying on the stem.

You can fit half a kid between the dark walls,

the other half floats somewhere over the fields

where dew dots long grass stalks and cows rub against

gate posts. Clean nicks. Chapped lips. Wet hair.

Fingers flutter over the barbed-wire fence

where he fell. Black stitches on cold, white skin.

Through the still water of a round glass vase

the yard primps perennials in pink and yellow –

refulgent, they live again, as they do each spring.

A cow lumbers past, rubs the fence post again.

A moth dusts my fingers and is gone. The earth’s mantle

folds, forming a skin over my brother’s body

and I am wedged between wooden slats, not breathing.

My mother washed the walls of that house

with the assurance of those who see order in chaos,

doors flung wide to butterflies trussing their beds outside

among weeds, tumbled hay bales, twisted apple trees.

I never caught a butterfly all the summers we lived there

never tried enough, afraid of crushed wings releasing

orange-yellow dust into the night breeze.

My mother’s breath at my ear freed me into sleep

while luscious fields edging up to my window

swished their long grasses onto my carpet.

Slipping headlong I slept like a riverbank,

waves lapping against my velvet clay chest.

Few words were spoken, even fewer remembered

for I’m still half submerged.

The practiced hand of progress

did its surgery on our village,

its skin razed concrete-smooth,

raspberry thickets, knotted roots and stones

peeled back like thick handfuls of scalp.

The mind startles.

A crop of beige houses sprouts up erect,

the celebrated seeds of eugenic success,

while weathered barns and wooden fences crumple under.

The seams of a yellowed map – its terra incognita

glimmers in the dusk of our awareness.

Now no location is unknown

and places we secretly inhaled

like the scent of our bed pillows

are lost in the static of an electric night;

this is the sound of our proliferation

as we pillage ourselves in darkness,

scattered points of light.

Meticulously ravenous,

the plane erases all that I call my own.

Forceps pull weight through customs,

a body – not mine but an occupancy en route –

pulls the seat up, remembers roaming

the fields like a dog off the leash and

huddling to pee under a giant hemlock

as the carpool mom drove by, calling, calling.

We were farm kids going nowhere.

We have everywhere now

and it has us.

The city’s intersections dilate in the slick night.

We course the dark streets in our fathers’ cars

along roads too narrow to contain our desire.