Poetry | September 01, 1997

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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