Amie
       

Clotilde found me in the hayloft, sticking straws under my nails. She
saw where I'd scratched a broken cross on my wrist where veins sketch a
blue delta. And she shrieked, the cuts smeared with blood. Qu'est-ce que
tu fais? T'es folle, Fernande! What could I say? I thought, Here. Dig in.
Plough the furrow with a heart. Put your mark on me. But she took a
kerchief, spit on it and wiped me clean. Ça veut dire quoi? My answer
froze to filaments of frost, which came to kill the crops early that year.
And when she saw the silence in me settling like drifts of white, she
kissed the words I swallowed as snow. First, little bisous all over my
cheeks, flakes or flecks of wet. Little bisous until one full baiser on my
mouth. I saw a field of stars blinking blue and pink around me, stars
such as my mother never stitched, a galaxy of guilt and want. And the
place between my legs shivered in one huge surge of wave, the way the
wheat bends in a coursing curve of gold when the wind gusts once, fast,
against it. T'es folle, Fernande, she said again. And only the horses
spoke back to her, with whinnies and tail swishes muffled from below.
Only the horses

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Copyright © 2017 Gillian Cummings All rights reserved
from My Dim Aviary
Black Lawrence Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission