Dear Field
by AIDAN FORSTER
Before barn
there was silo:
I learned to work for my space.
I pulled rain and song
from the earth and ate them
whole and uncooked,
a small harvest I loved
until the birds returned.
My grandfather taught me
that grass was a boy
in a prairie dress. My mother
handed me a portrait
of a girl dressed in farm tools,
rain and its blue afterimage.
Together we built the barn and cried
when the wood ran out.
Together we were antidotes
of feather and root:
taken best with the sea
which we dreamed of
but had never seen. In the end
we slunk into the forest
to sleep. In the end my body
was a place I visited
but did not belong to:
a bright green clearing
with a boy in its center, unable
to touch his own skin.