Unstoppered, I pour lye on wet hay bales. The encyclopedia opens for smoke. When the button trembles, I tremble.
When the bottle breaks a long neck, your checkerboard cowers in the field. Thin grasses & their hundred lonely eyes blink into soil. Burn the bilge pumps. Burn the doors.
Take the match from your mouth & strike it against your knee. Last time you cut a patch of quilt to fit your peephole. The harness softens with lye,
bubbles in tree sap encase the ants.
Buttons separate the hay into tufts of comfort.
Falling from tree branches, cicadas bounce the handshakes & leaden your house. A roaming brother carves a slingshot, your water cup warmer by night.
The mouse trembles in your palm. Sixteen nails fall from the beams at once. Maybe the only luxury
is a hook jutting out of the doorframe, coins to clang in your brother’s shining lunchpail.
Latches gutter smoke into lost keys that your brother buttons into his cotton vest. You may never break the grip. You must store a block of ice below the tool shed.
As your bedsheet swarms with black ants, mementoes, a glass tumbler stretches over your mouth.
A photograph blooms a hay bale of a thousand snakes. You fall into a pit of salt as deep as your brother’s slow tackled kin.
A movement of branches shines the cheek & the braided hand helps you up this tree. You climb that tree & watch the fields smoke. Playing lookout is an easy way to pass the pail. Skinned knee.
Chokeberries fall to the shale, wool-rub the boat’s side. Gruffly, your brother rubs the paint from the hull that bricks prop. Runs his sword through a white sheet on the clothesline, breaks a block of ice with a miniature hammer. The vines curl & take you to the craning grove.
Tight green flies spill into the mica porthole. There is little to find in a ploughed field. We fall from branches & the mice dry like kites. Mother pulls a bowl of berries, pours the heavy cream & the taste of the spoon in my mouth was soft. Only replaceable by a finger.
A periscope lured your sandals into the rhenium muck. Your brother is reticent, wary of the wind pulling him too far, to a neighbor feigning agreement. Six men in work boots walk into view, fog trailing from their mouths. They hang hammers from his belt loops, lead him to the cow pond
where the half-boat lurks. Your father drums on the keel. This water that trickles past the sunken tractor continues to the barricade. Your brother dusts his own ears, oils the engine. The ship battles pond insects without defeat. The berries ice over, stowed like a sweater.
The six men step into the creek & sink to their hat-brims, a water moccasin swills the cattails & knots into a handbag. Your brother opens the handbag, removes three mice by their tails. You need the silo so the grains can pour out. Bake bread on the deck & curb the father to the anchor.
When we drown the names of the dead we leave our muddied hands in the chapel. The roads of crushed turtles lead out to a lesser. I leaned on the mailboxed road.
Julia Cohen & Mathias Svalina are the authors of four collaborative chapbooks, most recently When We Broke the Microscope from Small Fires Press.