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-

-made room, where I forget.