She won’t remove the cabbage bug,
But handles every fanning leaf,
Stretching down into the blossom’s core
Where it sleeps, curled in glutenous dream.
I pick it out and offer it to the birds—
indelicate creatures roaming the greens,
the beaks stab and stab again, missing
often for that one direct hit through the heart.
Jared Pearce teaches literature and writing at William Penn University and has recently published poems in Creosote, The Louisiana Review, Permafrost, and Dos Passos Review.
