It can plant seeds and force them to grow.
It thinks it knows everything. The real problem
is all the rain in July. If you touch
tomato plants when they’re wet, share a knife
between stalks of chard, the blight spreads.
When it rains, farmhands sit in the barn
sorting yarn. Sheep hair severs
like tree rings every hard winter.
The male goats will yodel all night,
quarantined in their horseshoe pen.
After a month, you don’t hear anything.
You assume the greenhouse below my bowels
holds trays ready for seeding. Everybody does.
The farmer works from first light to last.
That’s why I don’t want to be a farmer.
Too much light. Too many rows and fragile
plants easily snared under the hoe.
The sheepdog dies, its stomach knotted
inside itself. I am knotted inside myself too:
take my desire, faults, and doubts.
Then pull. I haven’t yet learned to be left
behind with the string, whole.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 19, Issue 2.
See all items about Emily Jaeger