A Man’s World
will be gentle and easy as breezes, and bountiful with blooms:
it will be bloodroot, fireweed, and trillium, sweet with marigold, brambles, thick
maple syrup, humidity, and desirous warm rain. Nights
will be dewy and star-lit in a man’s capacious world, earthworms churning
and a family of rabbits coming out to play. There will be thickets
and swamps nested with creatures: toads, muskrats, woodcock, towhee, lynx,
river otter, fox. In the pond, a minnow. In the field, a fawn. In the sky,
a hawk and six low clouds, miles deep, in the shapes of anything
my brother and I can imagine. Bright sun, work songs, daydreams, lemonade,
my father’s hug, all in this man’s world; in the sky, in the field, in the pond
of another man’s world, bombs come down, prayers go up. Children
run harder and faster in a man’s world. Faster and harder, they run.
Kimberly Ann Priest is the winner of the 2024 Backwaters Prize in Poetry from the University of Nebraska Press for her book Wolves in Shells, and the author of Slaughter the One Bird (Sundress Publications). Her most recent book, tether & lung, is now available for pre-order from Texas Review Press. A professor of first-year writing at Michigan State University, she lives with her husband in Maine.
Read “The Book of Birds,” a poem by Kimberly Ann Priest also published in Terrain.org.
