Courtship
Before it became fields of big box stores and strip malls,
we rode our bikes in the large square blocks of farmland,
roads that went on forever before the next right,
miles of rich alluvial soils, plant rows all the way to the horizon.
The air smelled like dust and grain and chemicals.
The asphalt was hot under our bike tires,
the sound a whisk whisk, whisk whisk as we pedaled.
You in front, looking for peaches and sweet corn to pick.
Me in a skirt and sandals, following behind you,
admiring your calves, brown and strong,
your head turning to tell me something, both of us
laughing as we got farther away from our college town.
But that second right, the one with the white farmhouse,
the picket fence, the gate open. There, the goose with its sharp yellow bill,
fat with huge webbed feet, bigger than any English holiday dinner.
“Gear up,” you’d tell me, both of us pumping hard, my hem flapping.
Harder and harder, then faster and faster when the goose spied us,
neck thrust forward, bill pointed, torpedo body propelled down
the farmhouse path, honking and honking and honking,
eager to attack, peck our legs and knees and feet,
warning us to stay away, never come back,
to stop all of it.
If only we’d paid attention.
Before it became fields of big box stores and strip malls,
we rode our bikes in the large square blocks of farmland,
roads that went on forever before the next right,
miles of rich alluvial soils, plant rows all the way to the horizon.
The air smelled like dust and grain and chemicals.
The asphalt was hot under our bike tires,
the sound a whisk whisk, whisk whisk as we pedaled.
You in front, looking for peaches and sweet corn to pick.
Me in a skirt and sandals, following behind you,
admiring your calves, brown and strong,
your head turning to tell me something, both of us
laughing as we got farther away from our college town.
But that second right, the one with the white farmhouse,
the picket fence, the gate open. There, the goose with its sharp yellow bill,
fat with huge webbed feet, bigger than any English holiday dinner.
“Gear up,” you’d tell me, both of us pumping hard, my hem flapping.
Harder and harder, then faster and faster when the goose spied us,
neck thrust forward, bill pointed, torpedo body propelled down
the farmhouse path, honking and honking and honking,
eager to attack, peck our legs and knees and feet,
warning us to stay away, never come back,
to stop all of it.
If only we’d paid attention.
Jessica Barksdale’s fourteenth novel, The Burning Hour, is forthcoming from Urban Farmhouse Press. Her short stories, poems, and essays have appeared in or are forthcoming in Compose, Salt Hill Journal, The Coachella Review, Carve Magazine, Mason’s Road, and So to Speak. She is a Professor of English at Diablo Valley College in Pleasant Hill, California and teaches novel writing for UCLA Extension. She holds an MFA from the Rainier Writers Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University.