rain follows the plow, manifest
BY ERIN ELKINS RADCLIFFE
Saltillo, always and across:
no word for or even from yellowhammers,
their like or their portent.
In your cradle on the wreckpan plain,
they named you doubt—
with all their emblems of pain fastened outside,
your father’s father a patricide,
at the nigh end of a pike.
It’s a long sweetening: severe,
riddled with seam squirrels,
sego, and salt horse.
Bullbats overhead,
rockchuck and taxel underfoot:
a ragged banner,
extinct inside a cow path, a welt,
and a draw.
The outlet upon the outlet of blood.
Who here isn’t a naked possessor—
the dry and baking track
holding up a railroad without steam?
j
j
rotten logging
BY ERIN ELKINS RADCLIFFE
Both knees purple
where I scrambled after some elk teeth.
I had to think once or twice about you:
nobody breaks like that forever.
One day you’ll jostle into town,
dragging your hat rack behind you
your throat bright with snake head whiskey.
I’ll be sober in a field of praying cows:
there’s no plaster in an end town.
Trade the rain inside the hat rack
for a straight-colored horse,
turn your empty bottle, that old soothsayer,
sideways, into a prow.
because if we are what we make of each other
then we hardly have use for the light.
