Blackbirdan online journal of literature and the artsSpring 2014  Vol. 13  No. 1
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The Field

We were fetching in a spray
of dismembered poppies. They clutched
leaves torn ragged as summer,
with green tears threaded down their bindings.
They mirrored our veins. Low pulses
dispelled our breath. As one
we turned on a foundry stem, were shod
by the natural world. The air
grew green with knitting our cagy hearts
together, then the light, then the light
feathered upon our skins. I felt
my comrades buckle, the weather infected
with wanting. I was my comrades.
We roughed the ground as primitives;
we were the ground so roughed.
When the binding song began we reared.
Our hearts squeezed the roots of each poppy.
We pulsed the field; beneath the green
binding we jiggled our bodies to confound,
and no predator could latch a gaze. In our shared
circulation there was no weak prey;
my flank was the flank of my comrade;
our split voice cracked low and red;
in our heads of bound light no room
but for roughing and love, and the love
distended between us, and we grew
sweet and tender under such ministration.
And what lit us together the poppies ground down,
and we swarmed in a field gone fallow.  end  


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