Bleeding Hearts at Her Feet
Snipping her baby’s clothes like fat off
wet meat, she considers how she will outlive
the man puttering on the thresher, their sons
with him, and the cows always watching.
Clouds of cottonwood and alfalfa charge
the house like a plague—she blinks, keeps
closing the mouth of the scissors against the cotton
dress until it blends with the bleeding-heart petals
dipping over the porch rail like strung crystal or ice.
She thumbs the whiskey stain christening the neckline,
had tried to wash it out, to drown the drunken stupor
he raged down the cracked pine hall, wiping
his chin with the tiny, empty dress. The priest
had marveled at her garden, said she was
the only one who could grow such flowers here.
She considers killing them now to spite
the lord’s idea of fertile, but knows the row
of headstones would be difficult to hide.
wet meat, she considers how she will outlive
the man puttering on the thresher, their sons
with him, and the cows always watching.
Clouds of cottonwood and alfalfa charge
the house like a plague—she blinks, keeps
closing the mouth of the scissors against the cotton
dress until it blends with the bleeding-heart petals
dipping over the porch rail like strung crystal or ice.
She thumbs the whiskey stain christening the neckline,
had tried to wash it out, to drown the drunken stupor
he raged down the cracked pine hall, wiping
his chin with the tiny, empty dress. The priest
had marveled at her garden, said she was
the only one who could grow such flowers here.
She considers killing them now to spite
the lord’s idea of fertile, but knows the row
of headstones would be difficult to hide.
Emilee Kinney hails from the small farm-town of Kenockee, Michigan, near one of the Great Lakes: Lake Huron. She received her BA in Creative Writing and History from Albion College in Albion, Michigan and an MFA in poetry at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Her work has been published in The American Journal of Poetry, MacQueen’s Quinterly, SWWIM and elsewhere. Kinney is a poetry editor for MAYDAY and maintains her own website featuring contemporary poetry and book recommendations.
Art: The Machinations of Religion, oil on canvas, Rebecca Pyle