» Poetry

Natural Order

I’m a little more prairie than you, Mom.
Grew up a stone’s throw from winding,

forested trails. Trees arched over gravel
roads, and the place in the powder sky

where their branches met, a cathedral ceiling.
You buried downed birds in shallow graves,

in a vacant lot by your apartment. I watched

a whole deer decompose in a field. Made a school

project of her. Every quarter, on my class trip

to buckthorn country, to the task of weeding-out

invasive plant species, I saw the same doe
sink deeper into the ground. Drew her outline

on a worksheet more and more skeletal
with each visit to her muddy bedside. Mom,

you too have watched the seasons change.
Your childhood rotted into caretaking,

like a sun-bleached cordgrass giving
its whole self back to the ground.

When you were seven, you started buying
the family’s groceries each week—

cans of beans stacked in a bike basket,
cradled by cornstarch and white flour.

In elementary school, all my teachers
had the same four-pronged chart

of the seasons: spring turned
summer, then a gentle decline

into fall and a snowman

smiling through winter.

Nothing in nature actually follows

this pattern. A field mouse breeds

too many young, swallows
half of them back into herself.