“… in that silence you could hear wildflower pollen
sifting down the bee-fried air.”
—Ray Bradbury
Like the hollow of a yawn
and the body’s satisfying strain as arms pull east then west,
neck and shins north to south, Michigan
opens herself to sunlight, sleepy and wet with her own sweat,
dew seeming to arise from roots rather than sky,
the window screen’s sheer metal mesh
allowing sleepers to rouse in the scent of hayfields thriving
and peonies fattening. Praise be
the sizzle of sausage in the kitchen and buzzing bees!
And the fiscal conservative who wakes early to plod and plant
and seed, but not the phobias he breeds. Bless
the corn-haired child with book and shoes in hand
ready to rush the outside air after breakfast and caress
a diffused canopy of light pouring through the widespread limbs
of an old oak tree, thin-legged spiders scurrying along
bark veins. Little girl ingests silence like water,
and words she can’t yet read, spreading the pages of the book
across her lap to look up, often, over her knees
and watch the clouds change shape, whatever spirit
they are made of in no hurry to form its revelation,
so that she does not feel a wasp stroll peacefully under her shirt
just above a four-year-old’s aorta,
and her screams do not hasten the wasp’s departure
as the wily winged pollinator, now threatened
by squirming agony, stings the child five or six times
and the child bloodies the morning with sound
running toward the farmhouse, quickening her mother
from other mothering duties to gird up her loins,
meet her daughter at the door, rip off a shirt, and destroy the dark
destroyer with finely-tuned rage, Michigan
shaking off dawn’s wheeze,
reviving her urge to blister, relentlessly, with heat.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 28, Issue 3.
Kimberly Ann Priest is a writer and photographer whose book, Wolves in Shells, won the 2024 Backwaters Prize in Poetry from the University of Nebraska Press. She is the author of tether & lung (Texas Review Press) and Slaughter the One Bird (Sundress Publications). An assistant professor in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and Cultures at Michigan State University, her poetry has appeared in Copper Nickel, Poetry Wales, Prairie Schooner, and Birmingham Poetry Review.
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