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
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