Iowa, Summer
BY MAIA SIEGEL
I talked to every flower in the yard,
naming them. They stood attentive, waiting
for roll call. When I milked a cow it spurt out
nothing of value, clear liquid dashed
in the mud. I couldn’t pull hard at her. Her skin
hung loose into her own dung. When I moved aside
she replaced me with a statue of brown sludge, made
in my likeness. On the farm, a girl with my same name
wore a pouch around her neck. All summer I asked her
to open it. Instead, she taught me how to cut around a salad
so it looked like you ate it. Years later,
she would try to cut an avocado and open her hand
instead. The doctor gave her pills for it
that she never stopped taking. On the last day of August
she opened the pouch, grinning.
Like a named flower, I stood at attention.
Tim
BY MAIA SIEGEL
Lying down, he was beautiful—
his chest flat like a wooden porch,
his scalp, so sheltered from the sun,
turning green. He looked like
he was built to die in a war
that would never happen. He had cheated
his body’s wishes and this
was why it hated him, why it curled over itself
shaking his thin wrists, eating him through.
Next to him on the couch, my grandmother,
her mind gone, has the body of an iron tank. It guards
nothing, now. But it goes on patrolling, the dedicated army
of a nation that has fallen apart.
