Elegy as Mud Season
by Julia Bouwsma
Already the animal is softening. When I say my road is alive,
I mean mouths open up everywhere, spitting rocks, spitting bone
until one gives me a skull. I carry it up the path,
set it on the kitchen table. The canines are missing and the lower
jaw. But the eye-holes are so unmistakably round, we say house cat,
give it a name—this, our season for naming loss—
how it sifts off our skin, collects in soft mounds by the door. How it follows us
everywhere, even into bed where it sloughs the space between
us, grimed hollow parting our bodies in darkness warm enough
for a single, yellow blade of grass to grow.
I mean mouths open up everywhere, spitting rocks, spitting bone
until one gives me a skull. I carry it up the path,
set it on the kitchen table. The canines are missing and the lower
jaw. But the eye-holes are so unmistakably round, we say house cat,
give it a name—this, our season for naming loss—
how it sifts off our skin, collects in soft mounds by the door. How it follows us
everywhere, even into bed where it sloughs the space between
us, grimed hollow parting our bodies in darkness warm enough
for a single, yellow blade of grass to grow.
Julia Bouwsma’s debut collection, Work by Bloodlight, was selected by Linda Pastan for the 2015 Cider Press Review Book Award and is forthcoming in January 2017. Her poems and reviews appear in Bellingham Review, Colorado Review, Puerto del Sol, RHINO, and others. She lives in the mountains of western Maine, where she is a poet, editor, critic, small-town librarian, and farmer.