waiting for a bruise to turn gold.
midas light & again I unfolded
the day & called it good. breathe
to forget, every winter that has
passed like a sickness. glory.
mouth. quickening. down the long
distant horizon are skeins
of ripe corn, newly cast off
& wilting again – all the children
I will never birth. in this body
of years, everything we know
is some place foreign & searched
for. the sun will rise; the house
covered with warmth
so choking that we claw
hours apart. find our palms
breaking from use & the memory
of being so young, we were not
alive. & i’ll imagine the empty
field, to break it. yellow before
brown. canola. rapeseed
jaundiced past our unmovable
waists, pulling in thorns,
this spring, when I would
have become a mother. & how
it shucked hills of strength –
how, at once, the land brightened
& opened to that airless, smog-