The Plowers
by Isabella Wu

We drink chickadee calls like ice-cool lemonade,
dripping from somewhere up there, the light of heaven.
It, coursing down, drenches salted skin with sweat and sighs
as we gouge arrow-straight lines down the limpid green hills
and over the graying valleys of the Mississippi in the year of Nevermore.
 
The stream calls to its tributaries
gathering them to itself with a burble and a splash
as a mother hen gathers her young featherlings
growing plump in the process of growing old and mature,
ripening in the heat-stroke of an aged sun like good wine,
its waters sweet to taste but later sending your head spinning, spinning…
 
Like little leaves in the fall
when we finish our work for the year and
tuck away our swathers -or scythes- to be eaten alive
by rust, red and eager like life-blood flowing through hollow veins
that mimic the dry river beds of winter splaying out lazily in repose,
a little rest from work, nothing more
and dreaming of the harvest come again
by golden sun and rain-dew from livid violaceous skies.
 
Like this, we drift off to sleep like flakes of moisture from thin air
unaware we may never wake, only
melt away in the Mississippi tide to begin once again.