Poetry | September 01, 1997
Prairie
Pamela Greenberg
High atop a playground’s fuchsia frog
a girl spits pomegranate seeds
into the mammoth armful of meadow.
The field troubles her with longing
and culmination of longing:
the yellow spikeweed at her feet
and the unreachable furthermost prairie.
Spurring the ungiving flanks, she thinks
of bucking into the wildest West.
She could swallow fullthroat the horizon,
and never be seen again. Then again
she could strangle in this sweetness:
the smell of milk thistle and eucalyptus,
the firetower glinting, the wheeze
of hay fever caught up in her throat.
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