It was evening, it was morning . . .
Genesis 1:31
Yesterday, we gardened side by side—he, a circle
pressed into the earth, me a seed.
Then washed dishes in the kitchen.
The June breeze balmy and ridiculously scented with loam
and bloom.
He hummed. I dried. Later,
he tinkered in the barn while I went searching for his wallet
wanting to know if my picture was still there,
dogeared, or if it had been replaced.
I have looked so many times past and always it is there
to make me question if anything is happening differently—
or if we are just in love this way. Differently.
At night, we listened for crickets outside the bedroom window
while counting each whinny and hoof
from horses in the pasture after going to bed early
but staying wide awake
until he got up to smoke a cigarette without a word
and didn’t return before I fell asleep
so that I wondered how long he sat at the computer
in the living room before going outside to have another smoke.
His jawline always stiffened when he returned to kiss me
and I thought, perhaps, this was the way to kiss me.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 23, Issue 4.
Kimberly Ann Priest is the author of Slaughter the One Bird (Sundress 2021), Parrot Flower (Glass 2021), Still Life (PANK 2020), and White Goat Black Sheep (Finishing Line Press 2018). Winner of the New American Press 2019 Heartland Poetry Prize, her work has appeared in journals such as North Dakota Quarterly, Salamander, Slipstream, The Berkeley Poetry Review, Borderland and many others. She is an associate poetry editor for the Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry and Embody reader for The Maine Review. Find her work at kimberlyannpriest.com.
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