Husking by Jill Reid


 

Do you remember the days
of the Texas cornfield roads?
Our rented house hiding
between fields of broom corn
and sweet corn and how we moved
in a maze of green and gold,
our blue truck dusting
the edges of tall rows white.
I remember our double freedom,
how we sailed anchorless
past fields that anchored
generations to dirt and kept them
perpetually staring at sky, tasting
the air for rain while we smiled
at each other with horizons
in our eyes. When we did leave
I remember how the blond headed fields
were knotted with bloom and tassel
and how your gravel gaze plowed
past the view, our truck tires husking
toward the city where your career
was waiting to take root and grow
between us. I remember, too, how young
and quiet I sat beside you, staring
through the closed window
at glowing rows of corn
and then down the hill
of my newly curving belly,
swelling and blooming
like the places you never wanted
to stay.

 
 
 
Jill A. Reid lives in Pineville, Louisiana with her six year old daughter, Ellie, and nearly too many books to count. She earned her MFA in poetry from Seattle Pacific University and teaches at Louisiana College. Though she lived in Texas while completing an MA at Baylor University and spent a semester abroad in England, her roots are in rural Louisiana, a place that flavors many of her poems. Her poems are forthcoming or appear in The Missouri Review, Ruminate Magazine, Relief Journal, Big Muddy, and The Fourth River.