So Said Our Wind
BY Amy Jo Trier-Walker
A nearby cave at the moment. Many pockets, barefoot. The needle is crushed; the edges of our fingerprints drowned. A stainless finding. A bit of a sleeve is common, so we ignore it. No more mirrors; no more ends. Staring is the beginning, for which we are grateful. A place by the river, burned down by the scarecrows, they say. We would welcome them easily, but the crows peel off from the sycamore bark. Fevered, unmoving. Unlatching. The black door is shut, so we gather. Inside cabinets, crooked lids, eyes. The hourglasses, covered lazily in braids. A window without panes. No birds with ropes for the fall. This way. So said our wind. So said our names.
Wearing a trail
drug unmendable to sleep
better tomorrow
and rush
with a bend in the way
of child hands
under the shadow
and persimmon.
The rain will not stop tomorrow,
the fracture will not bleed,
and the wishes will wake stampeding
with nowhere to hold
and unravel.
Against Sense We See
A silent film organ on the train tracks. The fog’s so thick it keeps the rain off us. Still, the plantain’s louder than my nails biting through the clover. It’s edible, you see, like all things. The cat, but no more. How can you say women drink more whisky when you never drink it straight.
Then you’re off to the pile of fire. We were old once, and then passed it. There were puddles there. Now our feet don’t get wet. The shoulder-high grass is still trampled. We bite some off along the way, but it’s not time for nightshade harvesting yet. Still moving, mowing, around them. Only common now, not deadly. Although we all turn violet in the mourning.
It’s illegal to be out. So many spiderwebs in our eyelashes, we can’t see. And I keep on leading you to the left, leaning into you, widdershins, around the trail. Against sense stood my hair. For once I miss the rotting body in the valley, and there’s one firefly. I’ll never trust one who won’t walk without a moon or clouds. Or falling, dropping, you.
Amy Jo Trier-Walker is a tree and herb farmer in Indiana and the author of a chapbook, Trembling Ourselves into Trees, which is forthcoming from Horse Less Press in 2015. Her work can also be found in or is forthcoming from Forklift, Ohio, Handsome, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Word For/Word, and
inter|rupture, among others, and she is the Poetry and Art Editor at Black Tongue Review.