We round the trail bend and there—the scarecrow.
Flannel shirt and mud-smeared gloves,
a pair of boots worn out by some farmer’s toes:
tattered standards of a child’s spook. But the head’s
been eaten by club moss, a fern’s hooked fingers
unrolling from divot eyes. The skull is lurid
with green, dripping from tips of growth.
And in the cabin where we lodge for the night,
someone’s wedged a doll on a shelf,
webbed porcelain arms stretched out, hair
crushed in a ruffled bonnet. By the blunt
lamplight, its fat shadow bulges like a loose
trenchcoat, its satin purse drawn in the dark
like a rucksack dragged through mud.
I wake at the scream of a barn owl, its throat
grating air against the night, my own breath
snagged. I feel your skull move against
my pillow. Though I know your face well,
I can’t recognize you through the dim.
My eyes shift focus through the dark, find
the first traces of lines colonizing your skin.
Sisters
The convent kitchen is a furrow
of root vegetables. Carrots edge
from behind the butcher block,
parsnips jut from electrical sockets.
Potatoes shoot twine from eyes
when the sisters leave for prayers.
There’s a cleaver in the wall:
it dances a blade shuffle behind lathe
and plaster, impatient to whack at fiber.
Pots shudder from hanging pegs, murmur
at tufts of carrots’ baby hair, ring
the copper pot’s knell for rutabaga.
In the corner, Sister Isadore
haunches at the slop bucket, scales
at her thumb with a knife: penance
for having left the radish to mischief
with turnips. The sisters have
left her, a chair wedged at the door
to keep her immortal soul
from slinking out the crack of light.
The onion skin of her flesh
wafts to the bucket’s bottom,
joins tuber-rot without sound
as she works out her salvation.
Kelly Davio serves as Managing and Poetry Editor at The Los Angeles Review and reads poetry for Fifth Wednesday Journal. She is the author of Burn This House, forthcoming from Red Hen Press. She is a three-time Pushcart nominee whose work has appeared in Gargoyle, Pank, The Cincinnati Review, Women’s Review of Books, Best New Poets 2009, and others. She holds an MFA in poetry from Northwest Institute of Literary Arts, and teaches English as a Second Language in Seattle, Washington.