Clover and oats, a tangle of bile-
singed timothy hay—what Sonny
said we’d feel. Gloves
kissed to our elbows. Ferment of the winter
cow field. I feel a whole
bitten pasture as it broke
down inside her—blue barn
sweet with the atomic
shudder of barley. I reach past
that weave of hot forage to the fuchsia
grove, where after a future
lover and I drop
acid, he’ll wrap my neck
and wind my nipples with the fringy mimosas’
burlesque feathers. I reach back
and further through fields
to the French Canadian
with a musket wound blown
through his left side: the stomach wound
that gaped like hibiscus, wouldn’t
heal, even as he married
a white-haired girl from Lake Michigan’s coast,
fathered two girls. I touch
her cheek, where a platinum
strand splits her eye
from her lip, which opens and shuts
and opens. I watch
her feed him plum halves on a string
so she can pull the desiccated
fruit from his side’s portal
to know how matter moves
through his body. Now
the cow’s gut contracts and holds
my forearm. I’d scream
except for the throb
of her back’s heat, the peat
moss below that pillows
our joined shadow: cow and a girl
grafted as a radical
experiment. No, it’s when
I grew a whole heaving
beast for a palm, my wrist which holds
a Holstein’s pulse, pull
like a wound where inside the hay
breaks its weave, where the shredded
mimosa won’t shut.