At the Neighbor’s Farm, Our Son Begs the Peacock to Open His Tail
He begins with excuse me and ends with please.
The bird lifts his tail slightly at the root, as if he’d rather
make a big, glittering shit, rather drag his awkward heavy train around
through grass patch and coop dirt, than take the trouble
to turn, slow and wide like a tractor trailer, and see
who’s asking. It is only a human child, and not even female.
The boy wants to see whole regions of blue and green,
blinking in the light. So, thinks the peacock, show him the ocean.
Before my wedding, I ditched the veil. I wanted to be nimble
with the groom. In the closet: mosquito net, glued to a comb.
Daphne in Massachusetts
There’s a maple in our yard and
Daphne is crawling out of it.
See the tree’s southeast aspect?
She’s drawn open the bark
like it’s nothing. Her body
I’m telling you is
extraordinarily literal,
not fleshy like Bernini’s
white sculpture but hard
as a knot. Truncated neck,
one shoulder, left
flank, whole circular breast
and a nipple.
No face, thank god—
no mind separated
and branching.
And of course, nothing is stable.
In a windstorm
she tosses her limbs
long, broken
one hand raking against
my child’s window.
I’m ready to get
my chainsaw pants on
but oh Daphne
she’s come such a long way
headless, ragged
and nobody has warned her
about the freezing nights,
the days of thaw
when the god will come on loping
with his bucket and his tap:
forget that crown of laurel—now
he wants to drink her syrup.
He wants to drain her sap.
Lizzy Beck lives with her family in Western Massachusetts. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, The Cincinnati Review, Salamander Magazine, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Find her online at www.lizzybeck.com.
Header photo by Alexa, courtesy Pixabay.
