how
you
ran
the
pitch
fork into the cow’s flank, then
broke like a rotten nut. The cow heard
you; the gap between hearing and listening is less
than that between languages, like an aunt’s
face afraid of blown paper. There are reasons
you are alone. I reach
past the mud as a butcher would with
one hand to cup your heart, and I
wash wash it wash it until
there’s nowhere left to send the white envelope of you.
Michelle Matthees’ poems can be found in Memorious, PANK, The Baltimore Review, The Superstition Review, and elsewhere. In 2016, New Rivers Press published her first collection of poems, Flucht, a book about immigration, Eastern Europe, and adoption. She is currently at work on a new collection of poems about institutionalization. A graduate of the University of Minnesota’s MFA Program, she lives in Duluth, Minnesota