It’s very cold in the poem. All I have is the rhythm of my legs—spondaic—with an italic of gimp. And some mud. God might make a man out of that, conscript the wind for his voice.
The wind is blowing indecently, flapping some bird wings and my unopened umbrella silk.
Doing our best. We never do that. Torpid. Indolent with winter.
Rush now to the precipice of the line break. I keep putting birds in trees and lakes next to the vacant lot where something bad is happening.
All the time, I’m thinking garden, wilderness. More double meanings as if each word were a twin with a mirror and one hand held out.
Hedgerow. Chess plot. Remember how the birds loitered and attacked. Not in that order.
It could have been a time-painting. Women crouched outdoors, their hair blowing, the ground sloping away like a menial stooge.
Our hands stuffed into our pockets—thorium, plutonium. Tell-tale sag of a stone.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 27, Issue 6.
Susan Grimm has been published in Sugar House Review, The Cincinnati Review, South Dakota Review, and Field. She has had two chapbooks published. In 2004, BkMk Press published Lake Erie Blue, a full-length collection. In 2022, she received her third Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Grant.
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