推 spacedunce5: 03/22 17:11
When She Goes Out to Plow
--Bonnie Jo Campbell
She ties the boy in his crib,
though he’s too big
for the crib, after nursing,
though he is too big to nurse.
Her husband has gone out to trade
whatever men trade at the café.
It’s planting time on her dead father’s
farm, and she married
the handsomest man who made her hurt
the most. She still feels breathless
when he walks in and smiles.
It’s too cold for the boy to sit
on the tractor with her, no babysitter
in this godforsaken place. Her mama
didn’t live to teach her to fashion
solutions for the flesh
of her flesh. Her instinct for breast feeding
surprised her. She has known only
this fertile soil, the way this stretch
of the clay earth breaks into hard clumps
to allow absurd entry of seed, and the way
rain can soften or wash away.
She once watched a tornado turn a wooden barn
into a dance of planks and loose hay.
She used to wear her hair around her shoulders
and now her husband stays away all night.
Today she plows, and each time
the old one-story house
comes into her sights, her breasts
ache, strands of hair tear free and whip her.
http://thesmokingpoet.tripod.com/summer2009/id20.html
http://www.bonniejocampbell.com/booksandstories.html
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