Between Broken Poems

Between Broken Poems

She sulks between rows where weeds 
Grow wild as children, where she talks 
To clods, shiftless and dusty.  
Men gave her a lot of bull and she loved
It for the utter cow in her.  Between 
Finger and thumb, she squirms live bait 
At the edge of her words, her water.  

Grapes and memories wet and sweet 
Pooled under her tongue that day 
He made her mouth a target for the grapes 
He threw.  She tasted his laugh in the juice 
And tangled with his love, she swallowed 
With the skin and seeds.  She banked off on 
Maddening and split around midnight.  
Between broken poems are spaces 
Where poets keep their lovers—

Spaces where they slumber— 
The knotty thoughts they sleep with.
The man with the axe hacked through 
The underbrush of what she had written. 
His sneers posted keep off private property 
Signs on a fence he erected around words 
That all these years she thought belonged
To everyone.  The slash marks he cut 
Across her voice will grow scars, but the hearts 
Of poems she wrote for him will bleed forever.  

Speaking dirt language, she will sway 
With their love like a cornfield waving 
Its tassels.  As her poems sting his ears, 
He will shuck them off easy to forget as corn silk.