Great Plains

Photo By el-toro

I would wake up hollowed of home,
like the womb-loving part of me
had cracked itself open: a mockingbird
egg sluiced across the new morning.
I would leave bed to tear parcels
out the floorboard, pour thick red
soil and seed lupines, watch them sink
blue teeth into the parlor landscape
like a cottonmouth or coyote. I would
lay a pie tin and baling wire over
the breadbox, custom a dobro, pluck
western swing for the blooming.
I would snick windows into walls, cross
the open door frames with scraps,
that the library, breakfast nook, claw-
footed tub might welcome wild foxes,
sod poodles, cicadas, and snails, even
the saguaros, the night sounds of grasses
and horned toads and whip-poor-wills,
the patience of the dust bowl wind.
Then I’d wake again. And the day showed me
I needn’t return home. It returned
to me, crawling, mooing, in slant beams
like the sun, like the roof of the haunted
Lutheran church we always ran from
as kids. I only had to harrow, make space,
kill or conceal anything that got in the way.