The streets were glass, the cars and salt-bellied
trucks slid across them—perfect pirouettes
until the light’s red. Beyond the frosted
windows were the animals, and beyond
the animals silence, baled hay like spools
of thread scattered by a careless hand. In
the next season would I become just one
more hillside of purple vetch, unwanted
too-muchness sprung from a gravel pit’s mouth,
dead butterflies in my teeth? There were ten
thousand ditches where I could have lain my
body down. When I saw that early spring
meadowlark—one-winged, flapping in the road—
I pressed my heel to its chest, to the earth.
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