Passage
The crows are French, we know
because we think we do. The bread
absorbs the butter in slick yellow tarns,
the knife a conduit of remarkable tenderness.
She made tired the word. We cracked
walnuts by the television. Like from a robe
we slipped out from the velvety past,
a dew on our arms which reach forward.
There, the train again! The train is not
French now. The train is already gone.
I hate this, though I love this whole
horrible process. I loved to ride my bike
through fields I’d never seen before
and may never see again.
Flute
I hadn’t learned flute.
I was a gargoyle on the sink.
Butterscotch pudding was a thing
of daily performance, making
a mask for my evil face.
I got in trouble for calling Adam
A-dumb, and Gayle wiener.
Gayle, I’m sorry I called you wiener!
She had this beautiful border collie
who would run taut circles around
everything, as though to shrink it.
I had a lot of that energy,
myself. The house was a thing
to be run around naked in the rain,
hoping David didn’t see, screaming
hellion with a waxy bar of soap,
a little oval of Irish Spring.
CHELSEA HARLAN is the author of Bright Shade, winner of the 2022 American Poetry Review / Honickman First Book Prize, selected by Jericho Brown. She holds a BA from Bennington College and an MFA from Brooklyn College, where she was a Truman Capote Fellow. She lives in Appalachian Virginia, where she was born and raised, and where she works at a small public library.