A Nervous and Steady Progression of Many Bellies

A Nervous and Steady Progression of Many Bellies

In winter, this girl had been cold. Of
course and of there being no
salt pork stored away.
Her hands had been cut from
twisting hay to burn and
the ox in the dining room
had lowed at its food embering.
She had eaten the space between
his scarceness, his legs
had been no wider
than the bones beneath which
she had boiled over a stove of wheat.

The spangling train gleamed
in spring flowering with
sacks of beans and turnips
and trout and caribou, barrels
of yogurt and hominy,
and boxes of barley sugar.
This girl smelled of something
musky and peppery.
She shimmered through
the long grass and suckled
on clove candy ribbons.

The summer is as lumbering
as this girl, her breadbasket bulging.
She bloats on the front porch
eyeing pumpkins in her fields,
lumbering bees mating carelessly,
the oxen glowing with plump grains.
Juice drools down the sky’s chin,
pooling in sticky dribbles on the porch.
This girl blows balloons and rubs
their fat sides with butter.

That girl will give birth in crisp
weeds to a puking mewling
little girl. This girl will
squat and relieve herself on tight
sacks of corn and sit her rawboned bottom on
a fat squash. The slick train will
weave in like a corn snake, carting
duck cracklings and hickory
bacon and glancing autumn light.
This girl will glint at the train
which will spark back. She will clamber on
with clicking knees,
hitching the quickest spin out of her own century.