men would always tell me about the
arcs of screaming air splitting through gaia’s hair,
the heads of wheat falling, light shredding, and the sun bowing before
Leah and her scythe
this woman spent all her twenty one years in the fires of idaho
working for her father
preparing food for her brothers before their schooling.
she was made to stay at home,
and there she worked and washed and read and cut and crystallized
business men in windup cars would see her off the highway
her muscles swaying with the wind, treetop hair flogging the setting sun
singing folk songs to herself in a falsetto that sounded like a rocking chair.
these men would stop to chat, but soon realize that this
Leah was burning too much for them.
her heart was different from city folk
and most country folk for that matter.
her ventricles were connected through a series of
crimson twigs and gnarled vines.
it pumped like any other heart,
but it would crack and wheeze anytime she left that farm.
those businessmen expected that she would be enthralledby anything out of town.
but it was the opposite; fancy gadgets bore her and
snazzy suits and autos seemed like pointless little ornaments.
she’d be more impressed by a man who could cut wheat like she could
a man who could shoot life out of the iron earth
and feed his kin with the pickings of his heart.
but she never quite found a man like that.
she stayed there, and let herself bleed into those idaho hills.
the roots of the grain wrapped around her veins
and her lungs breathed for the farm
just as its rainfall pumped her brown blood.
she never grew old that Leah, because she kept her crop so fresh.
every morning she watered and plowed and every while,
with scorching eyes and whipping locks
she’d swing her scythe, and smell the breaking spines of wheat,
and would quietly sing,
like a rocking chair.
Posted by David Clifford Turner at