She climbed out from her own desire to make a baby

It became a never could

So there were castaways

The forlorn

The discarded from nevermind yesterdays

The cartoon images folded into her dreams

Leaked from the old television console

A recipe served up early morning in childhood

An array of reproductive paper cutouts

Strung along accordion style

Spruced up and stately like a picket fence

Containing her desires in all their bowling pin enamel sheen

All the while she lived on the farm

And survived flights to far-flung planets

Where cities breathed underwater

She studied the night sky

She studied horses

Watched the mares foal

Under the moonlit drippings

Where fluids coated the night

And the dogs ran off fighting over the afterbirth

When the jewels inside her sought the star’s fire

They attached faraway inseminations inside her

And whether four-legged or two

Imagined herself carrying a forbidden being

Blasted by the revolving planets

She could make this happen

Amidst the crushing boredom of the flat corn fields

And the whirring tractors

The stirrings at four before sunrise

Where everyone ate oatmeal silently

Drinking mournful cups of black coffee

Waiting for slivers of sun

To parse the day’s song like wedges of melon

She lost herself inside the spaces between the corn stalks

Guarding the margins of her private imagination

That swore she would only learn

From the proudest yearlings

Already jousting in their bewildered anxieties

She saw the truth in them

A lonely honesty mired in their angled jawlines

Noticing  how they grew and matured slowly

She saw the fight when they were taken from their mothers

In time they stood silently

Illuminated by stoic celestial orders

Proud in their earnest steadfastness