Member Poem

Arise, Vallejo

Vallejos tumbled and broke:

All uproarious, none still --

The father sipped sour wine

From between floating quarters;

The mother girded day sweat

Around her waist, and bit sidewalks;

The son believed in the crunch

Of bird bone under molars,

And the sacred power of divots,

And evangelized.

Rose, the youngest, took her eyebrows

For enemies, and plucked them until

Raw skin punched her smiles.

A gilt spindle of blunt rain

Wove bits of seaweed.

Flung to the wind, wild hair.

Purple wine in coin bowls

Bled through quarters,

Crusted around nickel edges,

Serrated.

Before knowing what was what, Rose

Stood in the center of a rye field,

Unable to frown.

A silo erect and proclamatory, stood

Close by.

A globe of brushy rye awns

Aspirated, as the moon rose,

And washy noises crept forward and back.

Seaweeds phosphoresced between yellow,

Unless it were the tidy glow of looking

That made them burn.

Rose’s wild hair,

Cut short with nickel-edges,  

Flung at the wind,

Dissolved into a black powder,

And was eaten as bread

By a thousand Saskatchewanian farmers.

Rose ran, with each shoefall cultivating

An understanding that one does not run

Toward the promise of an ending,

But from the horror of a birth.