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.
Linda's Literary Home 