Late morning again, and I haven’t bloodied
the grass, haven’t said I miss you. I search

for clover, though I’ve yet to see any
in this new yard. Hunting not out of hope
of preservation, to seal my own mutated luck

between pages, but for the release of a spring
after struggle. Ever have I popped the heads

gone to seed, slung them into fertile afterlives
with a noose of their own necks. My mother calls
and thinks she wakes me, but I was waiting

for the clover. I cannot hear her over windchimes
and her whining dog, survivor of eight hours

in the cab of a truck with a dead man. She came out
like the rest of us, clean but missing pieces. Cries
at a shut door, barks when we hug. She bites me,

but her teeth hit only my ringed finger. Off my hand,
the silver pinched into a crooked heart. She knows

I didn’t want to keep her, that I sold the truck.
Let me show you how to shoot the clover. Let me
tell you while we plan our next move, a city

with no clover, a city you’ll change your mind about
after I’ve already arrived. Clover won’t scatter

when you ask; it waits, then launches whole—
catapult, weapon, nothing to be wished upon.

 

Marina Greenfeld is a poet and editor from southwest Florida and North Carolina. Her work has been published by 86 Logic, Brooklyn Poets, Plainsongs, Product Magazine, and The South Carolina Review. She is a poetry student in the MFA program at the University of Mississippi.